Buy.com site attacked

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Yahoo, Ebay and now Buy.com hacked. That is what the spokesmen say.

Buy.com says Web site was attacked by hackers Reuters, 02/08/00 PALO ALTO, Calif. - The online store Buy.com Inc. said the outage it experienced Tuesday, the day of its initial public offering, was the result of an attack by computer hackers.

A spokesman for the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company said in a voice mail message that the site suffered a "coordinated denial of service'' attack, the same type of attack that led to a crash of Yahoo Inc.'s Web site for three hours on Monday.

Such an attack involves flooding a Web site's computers with fake messages, rendering it unable to send data and information out to consumers.

While the company's Web site had experienced increased usage because of the attention from its IPO on Tuesday, that was not the cause of the outage, the Buy.com spokesman said.

"It was running beautifully, until it got hammered by this attack,'' he said.

It was not immediately clear how long the site -- whose offerings range from books to computers -- had remained down, although it was back up and running by Monday afternoon.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 08, 2000

Answers

URL for above

http://www.digitalmass.com/news/daily/0200/0208/buy_com.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 08, 2000.


Sounds like its similar to what happened to TimeBomb2000 list right before the rollover.

-- Sheri Nakken (wncy2k@nccn.net), February 08, 2000.

See my earlier comment

Since many organizations EXPECTED denial of service attacks as well as viri over the rollover, they were powered down to some extent. While the "crackers" (hostile hackers) didn't do much around Jan1, they are now up to their old tricks.

It may also be router-related, as in yahoo's alleged case.

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), February 08, 2000.


For those interested in what happens in these attacks.

smurf A type of network security breach in which a network connected to the Internet is swamped with replies to ICMP echo (PING) requests. A smurf attacker sends PING requests to an Internet broadcast address. These are special addresses that broadcast all received messages to the hosts connected to the subnet. Each broadcast address can support up to 255 hosts, so a single PING request can be multiplied 255 times. The return address of the request itself is spoofed to be the address of the attacker's victim. All the hosts receiving the PING request reply to this victim's address instead of the real sender's address. A single attacker sending hundreds or thousands of these PING messages per second can fill the victim's T-1 (or even T-3) line with ping replies, bring the entire Internet service to its knees. Smurfing falls under the general category of Denial of Service attacks -- security attacks that don't try to steal information, but instead attempt to disable a computer or network.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 09, 2000.


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