Porn feud spawns new DNS attack
A pornographic website has taken down a rival by exploiting a previously unknown quirk in the Internet's Domain Name System. DNS Amplification, the type of attack used in this instance, has been used sporadically since December. But it started being talked about last month when ISPrime, a small New York Internet service provider, was hit hard with what's known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.
The attack was launched by the operator of a pornographic website who was trying to shut down a competitor, hosted on ISPrime's network, according to Phil Rosenthal, the company's chief technology officer.
The attack on ISPrime started on the morning of Sunday, 18 January. It lasted about a day, but what was remarkable was that a relatively small number of PCs were able to generate a very large amount of traffic on the network.
