t has been little more than a year since a massive data attack struck the underpinnings of the Internet, and security experts say a more coordinated attempt could do even worse damage. On October 21, 2002, people around the world cruised through cyberspace the way they do every day -- bidding on auctions, booking airline reservations, sending e-mail -- all the while unaware that someone was working overtime to try to bring the Internet to its knees.
Around 5 p.m. Eastern time, operators of the Internet's root servers, the computers that provide the roadmap for all online traffic, saw an unnaturally large spike in the amount of incoming data. It was a "distributed denial-of-service attack," a concentrated attempt to throw so much information at the servers that they would shut down.
The link for this article located at BizReport is no longer available.
