Solution: Re: Huge smurf attack

Thu Jan 14 20:51:41 UTC 1999

On Thu, Jan 14, 1999 at 03:13:34PM +0000, Peter Swedock wrote:
> 
> I think blamin' the 'scriptkidz' in this instance isn't accurate. I think this
> incident had a political component that is overlooked here, and one that
> requires discussion. And that this smurfing was, quite possibly, an answer to
> that political component.
> 
> I'm speaking about the "Nuremburg Files" which is downstream of Mindspring. For

[...]

> Given all that, is it hard to beleive that some-one, moderately skilled in
> networking but extreme in political views, attempted to shut down this page by
> shutting down Mindspring?

It's an interesting thought. But someone who is 'moderately skilled' in 
networking would have been able to do a simple nslookup to find that
www.christiangallery.com and irc.mindspring.com are in fact two completely
different machines (on different subnets even). There's a slight chance
that this was an attack launched to try to shut down the Nuremburg site,
but I'd bet money that it's Just Another IRC Server Attack.

I've discussed this with other geeks before. One day (probably soon) we'll
see a person/persons with extreme views on some issue launch an attack
on servers that support organizations that they're opposed to. It'll
be extremely interesting to see how it all happens and what the reaction
to such an attack is.

There are plenty of nuts out there, and they're getting on the Internet 
in droves. God help us when they start learning about denial of service
attacks.

Robbie