contributed by Space Rogue
The Day the Internet Melted
Monday's Denial of Service attack on Yahoo was repeated yesterday afternoon at Buy.com and quickly followed by attacks on Amazon, E-Bay, CNN and possibly even UUNet. Most of the sites where able to block the attack and where back online within an hour or two. The San Francisico office of the FBI has opened an investigation into the attack on Yahoo however it is unknown how far the investigation has gotten at this point. Some of the effected companies have also started their own investigations into how this has happened. A source close to one of the effected companies has told HNN that they have been able to trace the attack back to one end node where they found a list of up to ten thousand possibly compromised systems.

E-Bay System Status
ZD Net
CNNfn
CBS
C|Net
Bloomberg
CNN
Wired
Wired
Associated Press - via Nando Times
Reuters - via Yahoo

Distributed Denial of Service attacks, DDoS
Distributed Denial of Service attacks aren't new, they have been around for a while. The basic premise is to use a larger number of systems to request information from a single server, similar to a radio call in contest where potential contestants get busy signals. Seldom is data lost or access inside the targeted systems gained, however visitors to the site are prevented from accessing data. The large number of systems used to launch the attack can easily be controlled by one person.

The CERT Coordination center held a workshop concerning this type of attack back at the beginning of November.
Results of Distributed-Systems Intruder Tools Workshop

CERT has also released a couple of advisories warning system administrators about the dangers of this kind of attack.
CERT Advisory CA-99-17 Denial-of-Service Tools
CERT Advisory CA-2000-01 Denial-of-Service Developments

contributed by Mike
Northwest Airlines has received permission from a Federal Court to search the home computers of a dozen flight attendants. The search would look for evidence, incriminating emails or other documents. It is believed that the employees helped to organize a sickout at the airline. The search is currently on hold pending a possible settlement of the airline's lawsuit against the flight attendants union.

Scary quote of the day: "Business speech is not subject to the same protections as political speech, You can't say whatever you want about a company." - John Roberts, Minneapolis Attorney

The Star Tribune

contributed by Lance Link
Not content with restraining orders against named defendants obtained through lawsuits filed by the DVDCCA and the "big 8" the MPAA has now started sending its own cease-and desist letters to people who aren't even covered by the court rulings. Peter Junger, a law professor at Case Western University, picks apart an MPAA letter sent to John Young, maintainer of the superb cryptome.org archives.

MPAA Letter
Junger's Analysis

contributed by no0ne
Researchers at the Health Privacy Project at Georgetown University have released a study that shows that most medical web sites share surfers collected data with other companies. These web sites have privacy policies clearly posted however the sites are not following their own policies.

Fairfax IT

contributed by janoVd
The Federal Trade Commission has begun an investigation into Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, concerning the companies use of the private customer data. Alexa Internet and its software tracks where users go on the World Wide Web to provide related Web links and other data. The informal FTC investigation into Alexa has come after charges that companies software secretly intercepts personal data and sends that information to third parties, including Alexa's parent company, Amazon.com.

Associated Press - via Nando Times

contributed by William Knowles
Japanese officials are digging deeper into the investigation of the recent defacements of several government web sites. Observers have asked the question of whether the system administrators lived up to their obligations as operators of Web site servers.

Daily Yomiuri

contributed by Apocalyse Dow
Malicious intruders still use temporary guest accounts, unrestricted proxy servers, buggy Wingate servers, and anonymous accounts to roam unfettered through the internet. One would think that some of these old holes would be patched by now.

InfoWorld