PhysOrg: Data defenders: Researchers try to ward off increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks

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February 2, 2010
by Anna Lynn Spitzer

Cyber attackers were busy last year. In July, a coordinated "denial of service" assault was launched on computers at the White House, Federal Trade Commission and departments of Treasury, Transportation and State, as well as the New York Stock Exchange and The Washington Post. The attack did little damage.

In August, social networking site Twitter suffered a similar assault that disabled it for hours, while Facebook and Google escaped without prolonged downtime.
In both cases, experts blamed “botnets,” huge armies of machines infected with destructive software that can be remotely controlled to perpetrate network attacks.

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