Barely 24 hours after a new MyDoom variant was reported in cyberspace, online advertising company DoubleClick was hit with what security analysts determined was a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack, smothering the company servers with floods of fake Web page requests and blocking numerous sites from loading advertising images.
The attack was believed to have begun at 10:30 a.m. EDT July 27, causing problems for surfing Netizens to load pages at almost all the top-visited sites, with affected pages available less then 25 percent of the time at the peak of the attack, according to various security analysts. The hardest-hit sites were said to have included those of Nortel Networks, Gateway, MCI, CNN, the Washington Post,and Schwab.
DoubleClick told reporters the attack hit their domain name servers and caused severe service disruptions for all nine hundred of its customers. Spokeswoman Jennifer Blum said the company thinks the attackers used thousands of hijacked computers to launch and sustain the attacks.
"Beginning this morning our DNS infrastructure came under a denial-of-service attack from outside sources," she told reporters later in the day. "The situation has improved over the last few hours and we continue to take steps to resolve the situation permanently." DoubleClick has reportedly contacted authorities without saying which ones, but the FBI said they hadn’t yet been one of them while the Department of Homeland Security has yet to comment about the attacks.
Web performance monitors Keynote Systems said the DoubleClick attacks were very similar to attacks against Akamai, in which hackers hit a common infrastructure many rely on. “One of the things that makes the Internet so survivable,” said Keynote vice president of technology Lloyd Taylor to reporters, “is that no one company or technology runs the whole thing.”
The new MyDoom used major search engines like Google and Yahoo to help it spread, with results including users being unable to get to those search engines at all, though Internet security analysts said the overall impact on the engines was likely unintentional.
