[71528] in North American Network Operators' Group
Computerworld: Q&A: Tom Leighton, chief scientist at Akamai
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Kennedy CISSP)
Thu Jun 17 00:50:44 2004
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 00:49:42 -0400
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: David Kennedy CISSP <david.kennedy@acm.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Q&A: Tom Leighton, chief scientist at Akamai
He talked about the nature of yesterday's apparent DDoS attack
News Story by Jaikumar Vijayan
JUNE 16, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Akamai Technologies Inc. said today that
the Domain Name System problems it encountered yesterday were the result of
a sophisticated and targeted distributed denial-of-service attack against
the company. In an interview with Computerworld, Tom Leighton, the
company's chief scientist, talked about what happened.
What was the nature of the yesterday's attack? It was a name server attack
against four of our customers for whom we carry their name servers. Our
assumption was this was an attack against Akamai and it was perpetrated by
attacking our customer name service infrastructure. It is not impossible
that this was a coordinated attack against those four Web sites. Akamai has
a lot of key customers, and it could just be a coincidence that the four
happened to be Akamai customers. [But] we are assuming it was an attack
against Akamai.
<snip>
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,93875,00.
html?SKC=security-93875
