Great article... THE ZOMBIE HUNTERS On the trail of cyberextortionists. - GoFuckYourself.com

dready · 10-12-2005, 07:59 AM

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../051010fa_fact

One afternoon this spring, a half-dozen young computer engineers sat in the headquarters of Prolexic, an Internet-security company in Hollywood, Florida, puzzling over an attack on one of the company?s clients, a penileenhancement business called MensNiche.com. The engineers, gathered in the company?s network operations center, or noc, on the fourth floor of a new office building, were monitoring Internet traffic on fifty-inch wall-mounted screens. Anna Claiborne, one of the company?s senior network engineers, wandered into the noc in jeans and a T-shirt. The MensNiche attacker had launched an assault on the company?s Web site at 4 a.m., and Claiborne had spent the night in the office fending it off. ?Hence,? she said, ?I look like hell today.?

MensNiche?s problems had begun a week earlier, with a flood of fake data requests?what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack?from computers around the world. Although few, if any, of those computers? owners knew it, their machines had been hijacked by hackers; they had become what programmers call ?zombies,? and had been set loose on MensNiche. The result was akin to what occurs when callers jam the phone lines during a television contest: with so many computers trying to connect, almost none could get through, and the company was losing business.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../051010fa_fact

psili · 10-12-2005, 08:13 AM

I dig those stories. Here's an older one for a gambling website:

Quote:

How a Bookmaker
and a Whiz Kid
Took On an Extortionist ?
and Won
Facing an online extortion threat, Mickey Richardson bet his Web-based business on a networking whiz from Sacramento who first beat back the bad guys, then helped the cops nab them. If you collect revenue online, you'd better read this.

http://www.csoonline.com/read/050105/extortion.html

10-12-2005, 07:59 AM	#1
dready Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Toronto, ON Posts: 5,247	Great article... THE ZOMBIE HUNTERS On the trail of cyberextortionists. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../051010fa_fact One afternoon this spring, a half-dozen young computer engineers sat in the headquarters of Prolexic, an Internet-security company in Hollywood, Florida, puzzling over an attack on one of the company?s clients, a penileenhancement business called MensNiche.com. The engineers, gathered in the company?s network operations center, or noc, on the fourth floor of a new office building, were monitoring Internet traffic on fifty-inch wall-mounted screens. Anna Claiborne, one of the company?s senior network engineers, wandered into the noc in jeans and a T-shirt. The MensNiche attacker had launched an assault on the company?s Web site at 4 a.m., and Claiborne had spent the night in the office fending it off. ?Hence,? she said, ?I look like hell today.? MensNiche?s problems had begun a week earlier, with a flood of fake data requests?what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack?from computers around the world. Although few, if any, of those computers? owners knew it, their machines had been hijacked by hackers; they had become what programmers call ?zombies,? and had been set loose on MensNiche. The result was akin to what occurs when callers jam the phone lines during a television contest: with so many computers trying to connect, almost none could get through, and the company was losing business. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../051010fa_fact __________________ ICQ: 91139591