With Q in decline and disarray, Carly (Fiorina) might well be acquiring the island of Atlantis - James C. Blasius
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Christmas hackers take down retailers
HACKERS TARGETED the domain name service (DNS) providers for Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia yesterday and bought them all to a grinding halt.
Several of the retailers websites were taken offline, which effectively prevented anyone from finding any last minute ties and socks, er, presents there.
Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand name said that the websites were either unavailable or extremely sluggish for about an hour. Apparently the Christmas grinches targeted Neustar facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose.
The company received a disproportionately high number of queries coming into the system, and analysed it as an attack. Within a few minutes the outfit deployed a "mitigation response" and brought matters under control within an hour.
Smaller retailers that rely upon Amazon for web hosting services were also taken down by the attack. Amazon's S3 and EC2 services were affected by the problems.
It is not clear what caused the attack, or even what the hackers' motivation might have been, other than preventing people from getting a visit from Father Christmas this year. µ
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You've already lost this battle.
People who break computer security are called crackers.And for executing a DDOS attack on several sites with the tools that are out there right now you don't have to be smarter than a 10 year old kid.
Dear Journalists, please take a look here and stop being so ignorant:
http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/cracker.html
http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
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