DoS attack blamed for Internet outage

A denial of service attack on security website Zonelabs has been blamed for major disruption of the Internet over the past couple of days.
According to an anonymous NTL employee's posting on www.frogger.uklinux.net, the DoS attack was launched from 'someone in Eastern Europe': 'NTL was used as a stepping-stone from which an attack on Zonelabs was launched. BT and Pipex were also affected, although not as badly, it would appear.'

We reported yesterday that Telewest's Blueyonder services were being hit by what the company claimed was a network fault. It was later suspected that a damaged undersea transatlantic cable was to blame, but this does not appear to have been the case.

In fact, what occurred seems to be the latest in a series of DoS attacks designed to extort 'protection money' from website owners. Earlier this month we reported that, 'The people behind the attacks demand thousands of pounds to "guarantee" that such attacks won't happen again.