WP: Attack On Internet Called Largest Ever

Tue Oct 22 23:58:45 UTC 2002

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Randy Bush wrote:

:when an attack happens that was generally not even perceived by the
:users, it's a major disaster
:
:i love the press

A close read of the article shows that the quotes are actually
moderate and accurate, it's just the reporting style that is 
breathless and suggestive. 

Honestly, if it was CNN or Fox reporting, we would have seen 
an epic Geraldo Rivera special, standing outside Al Gore's office 
with an excavation team waiting to sift through the rubble 
of the Internet for clues to the whereabouts of Bin Laden, with 
hourly updates and opinion from various Survivor contestants. 

There are worse things. 

I get a number of regular briefings regarding these sort of 
things, and sadly, many of them are taken from press reports. 
To many executives, it doesn't matter what actually happened, 
as much as who said it happened, and how large an expenditure 
they said we can justify to our investors to mitigate the 
threat.  

The only useful recommendations I can think of to give to 
regular users would be to increase the TTL's on their zones
to longer than a day if they are worried about root servers 
making their domains unresolvable, maybe expect occasional 
delays in name resolution when surfing the net, and to remind 
them to ensure their machines are locked down. 

Any others? 

-- 
batz