Wired: Attack of the Bots
The latest threat to the Net: autonomous software programs that combine forces to perpetrate mayhem, fraud, and espionage on a global scale. How one company fought the new Internet mafia - and lost.
November 2006
By Scott Berinato
AT FIRST, IT LOOKED LIKE typical network congestion. So the system administrators weren't too concerned when TypePad blogs and LiveJournal social networks flickered like a light bulb in a faulty socket. But 15 minutes later, at 4 pm on May 2, 2006, the sites went dark, and so did the mood at Six Apart, the company that owns them. In the blink of an eye, 10 million blogs and online communities disappeared. "It looked like the servers had freaked out," CEO Barak Berkowitz recalls. Flash floods of data thundered into one network port, stopped inexplicably, then reappeared to overwhelm another. The engineers pored over logs, desperately looking for a cause. After an agonizing hunt, they found it: a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS. Six Apart's servers had been inundated with so many requests that the machines couldn't possibly process them all. It was the digital equivalent of filling a fish tank with a fire hose.
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