Could An Attack Shut Down The Net?

Verisign’s chief security officer warns about dangerous denial-of-service attacks.

Verisign, the company that administers the .com domain suffix, has warned that a successful denial-of-service attack on the company’s servers could bring down the Internet.   Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk, Verisign’s chief security officer, Ken Silva, said,   "There are attacks attempting to shut down our servers. This would effectively shut down the internet."   He told ZDNet.co.uk that although it was hard to trace the attackers, there were known groups in Russia, China and Romania, and that "it would be hard to imagine groups who have this much activity going unnoticed by their governments."   Probing denial of service attacks are quite commonplace, and are likely to become even more so as hackers assemble larger and larger botnets, made up of computers they’ve infect and are able to control. Recent months have seen more companies and especially institutions under attack from massed botnets. This means more resources are being allocated to security, rather than for development.