[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Khoder bin Hakkin) writes: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/20011205/tc/national_computer-security_site_attacked_1.html
> National computer-security site attacked > > By Robert Lemos CNET News.com > > The Computer Emergency Response Team's Coordination Center, an > important national clearinghouse for computer-security information, > came under attack Wednesday, leaving its main Web site only > intermittently reachable. > > The so-called denial-of-service attack didn't affect the group's > ability to push security incident information to its members, but made > public access to its sites a crapshoot. > > "We are working with our service providers to resolve this problem," > Bill Pollak, public relations coordinator for the CERT Coordination > Center, said in a statement. > > A denial-of-service attack can take one of two forms: a flood of data > that overwhelms the Web server or the bandwidth leading to the server, > or a specific command crafted to disable critical servers or Internet > routers. The CERT Coordination Center (news - web sites) would not > identify which type matched the attack it was suffering from. > > The group, based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., > coordinates the communications among the myriad response teams > scattered among U.S. universities, companies and government agencies. > > It has public Web sites to inform both members and non-members of > threats but also has private networks capable of alerting members to > high-priority computer-security incidents. > > Officials at the CERT Coordination Center would not give details > of the attack but earlier acknowledged that such attacks are not > uncommon. In May, the group suffered a similar attack. > > "We get attacked every day," Richard D. Pethia, director of the > Networked Systems Survivability Program at Carnegie Mellon's Software > Engineering Institute, said in a May interview. "The lesson to be > learned here is that no one is immune to these kinds of attacks. They > cause operational problems, and it takes time to deal with them." > > The CERT Coordination Center is part of Carnegie Mellon's Software > Engineering Institute.