FBI Fends Off DoS Attack

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FBI Fends Off DoS Attack

By David McGuire, Newsbytes.

February 29, 2000

The FBI confirmed today that it recently warded off a denial of service attack against its Web site.

In the wake of the recent spate of denial of service attacks against commercial Websites such as eBay.com and Amazon.com, the FBI was struck with its own denial of service attack a little over a week ago, an FBI official confirmed today.

FBI officials noticed a substantial slowdown of their Website operations two Fridays ago, said the official, who asked that his name not be used. "We weren't really sure what it was (until) we got in touch with our Internet service provider (ISP) and they said it appeared that we were under attack and that there were a bunch of computers involved."

The ISP took steps to address the attack and the whole incident lasted fewer than three hours, the official said. The site never went down completely, but it did slow down significantly during the attack, the official said.

The FBI had vowed to aggressively investigate the denial of service attacks launched against commercial Web sites, but the official would not speculate as to whether those assertions prompted the attack.

Reported by Newsbytes.com

http://currents.net/newstoday/00/02/29/news1.html

-- Jen Bunker (jen@bunkergroup.com), February 29, 2000


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