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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:58
Alex Alten (Andrade@netcom.com)
Sun, 16 Aug 1998 08:01:36 -0700
Bruce,
You are making it sound worse than it is. The underlying network
routing infrastructure is designed to be extremely robust in the face
adverse conditions (originally it was nuclear attack). I'm only aware
of two incidents that actually ground large parts of the Internet to a
halt. The 1st involved a bug in the backbone rounters when the Internet
was young and had relatively few nodes. The 2nd was the Morris worm
which effected primarily Unix computers running Sendmail with a backdoor
function turned on. Even in that case many of the disconnections were
done voluntarily until the worm was eliminated. Today there is a much
wider variety of software and hardware running on the Internet making it
very difficult for denial of service or other types of attacks to
succeed on a vast scale. For example a Morris worm attack would have
to target Exchange as well as Sendmail to even have a hope of moderate
success today. An attack on an individual host machine to gather
passphrases or insert malicious web pages, etc., may be easy to do,
especially if no proper attempt has been made to harden the site.
However it is not equivalent to bringing down the Internet.
- Alex
At 06:17 PM 8/10/98 -0500, Bruce Schneier wrote:
>See my editorial:
>
> http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/business/docs/hotbutton09.htm
>
>Bruce
--Alex Alten
Andrade@Netcom.Com (home--old) Alten@Home.Com (home--new) Alten@TriStrata.Com (work)
P.O. Box 11406 Pleasanton, CA 94588 USA (510) 417-0159
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:58