Nine of the 13 鈥渞oot鈥� internet servers that direct all web traffic around the globe were subjected to a serious attack early on Tuesday. Attacks on these servers have the potential to bring the net to a halt.
The FBI and the Whitehouse are now investigating the incident. A spokesman for the FBI鈥檚 National Infrastructure Protection Centre said officials were 鈥渁ware of the denial of service attack and addressing this matter鈥�.
Another official described it as the most sophisticated attack ever mounted against critical internet infrastructure.
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It is not clear who launched the attack or why. The servers were bombarded with fake traffic from a host of 鈥渮ombie鈥� machines that had been hijacked by hackers. The technique is known as a distributed denial of service attack.
Ten of the root DNS servers are located in the US and the other three are kept at secret locations outside the US. Richard Clarke, cyber-security advisor to President Bush recently warned that DNS servers could be a potential target for terrorists.
Rapid response
The incident is not believed to have had a serious impact on internet traffic because it lasted for only an hour. The companies that operate the root DNS servers rapidly contacted the companies hosting the zombie computers, which were then taken offline.
鈥淵esterday for about an hour, there was an electronic attack on many of the root servers,鈥� said Louis Touton, vice president the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the internet鈥檚 governing body. 鈥淚t didn鈥檛 have any effect on any internet users that we鈥檙e aware of,鈥� he told AP.
The 13 root domain names system (DNS) servers store master copies of files that match all domain names to the numerical addresses used to route internet traffic. For example, the system maps www.newscientist.com to its internet protocol (IP) address 194.201.29.81.
Without this system most internet traffic would never reach its desired location. But the DNS system should in principle work if just one server remained functional.