From: William Knowles (wkC4I.ORG)
Date: Thu May 04 2000 - 03:18:34 CDT

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http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000502S0016

By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb
May 2, 2000 (4:33 PM)

A Carnegie Mellon University group that monitors security issues on
the Internet has issued a warning on a new tool being used in
distributed denial of service attacks. The CERT Coordination Center
said Tuesday in an e-mail message that it received reports in late
April of the "mstream" tool being used to launch denial of service
attacks on websites.

"We believe the code for 'mstream' to be under active testing and
development," the organization said. "The tool is capable of producing
a severe denial of service condition. At this time, it does not
contain any functionality that adds to the overall threat posed by
tools in general."

This tool, and others like it, can be used to create a form of digital
sabotage designed to freeze a website by rendering it unable to manage
a torrent of service requests. This data flood comes from a group of
computers operated by remote control by people who have stealthily
gained access to them.

Canadian authorities in April arrested a 15-year-old boy and charged
him with two counts of mischief in connection with February cracker
attacks of this type that brought down several major sites, including
CNN.com, eBay, and Yahoo. The boy reportedly used the name "Mafiaboy."

The February attacks frustrated industry experts as they were almost
unstoppable, hard to trace, and indicated lapses in best practices for
securing networks.

CERT maintains a website with resources for handling these attacks and
the warning pointed users to its website, www.cert.org, for
information.

*-------------------------------------------------*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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