14 DAY TRIAL // Hackers attacking servers today has become something common. Though only a few are successful - they strive every day to do some damage to high profile companies. VeriSign - a giant amongst IT companies, and which operates two of the Internet's thirteen root servers - has complained that a successful denial of service attack could take down the Internet. They administer the .com domain, so a successful attack against them would be something huge.
Romania is On Ken Silva's (chief security officer at VeriSign) list of countries from which threats come. As seen on ZDNet, he stated that even though it's hard to trace a DoS attack, there are a couple of well-known groups in Russia, China and Romania that may be acting with their government's knowledge. He continued, saying that his supposition is based on the fact that this much activity going on cannot be unnoticed by a government.
Government knowledge or not, this type of attacks needs to stop. The company is trying the classic approach, throwing more bandwidth to thwart these attacks, but it seems that hackers are relentless. I have no idea why a hacker would go and attack VeriSign, to shut down the Internet, since this wouldn't do either side any good. Silva also stated for the same site that they're upgrading their hardware due to the fact they have to cope with an unexpected increase in the volume of malicious traffic at the network gateway.
To me, this look like a serious issue - till now, hackers have proven that there is nothing they can't do on the Web. But the day that VeriSign goes down because of a denial of service attack it will be clear that all security efforts are in vain, that nothing out there is safe, and that hackers can do anything they like?