New-age cyber-attack inflicts major damage with modest means - The Register

Tue, Feb 10th, 2009

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A sustained cyber-attack against a handful of niche pornography sites has demonstrated a novel way to inflict major damage on hardened targets using a modest amount of data, a security researcher has warned.

The technique - which tricks the net's authoritative name servers into bombarding innocent victims with more data than they can handle - is growing increasingly common, and it's likely only a matter of time before commercial attack kits add it to their arsenal, said Don Jackson, a researcher with Atlanta-based security provider SecureWorks. He also warned there is no easy fix because any remedy will potentially require settings for millions of DNS, or domain-name system, servers to be individually changed.

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