It was considered the “largest ever” internet attack in 2002. This distributed denial of service attack hit seven of the 13 servers at the top of the internet’s domain name system hierarchy. Now, 20 years later, its origins remain mysterious, but its methods and size still make it stand out. It isn’t the largest by the numbers anymore, either, but it does show how far both attackers and defenders have progressed. Taking a look back, what can it tell us about cyberattacks today?
Hitting 13 Top-Level Internet Domain Servers
According to The Register on October 21, 2002, at 5 p.m., nine of the 13 servers at the top of the internet’s domain name system hierarchy were attacked. The cybercriminals successfully brought seven servers offline and caused two others to go offline repeatedly during the hour-long attack. Because the attack was on all 13 servers at the same time instead of one after another, the Internet Systems Consortium that managed the servers did not have any warning. So, the attack caused more widespread outages.
During the hour-long attack, the attackers flooded servers with packets in an Internet Control Message Protocol ping flood. Instead of 8 Mbps of traffic, the attack sent more than 10 times the usual amount to each server.
The archived version of the Internet Systems Consortium report revealed:
Attack volume was about 50 to 100 Mbits/sec per root name server. That yielded a total attack volume of approximate ..
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