False information: CEO of Versign facts are wrong

Fri Oct 17 17:16:53 UTC 2003

> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 09:47:35 -0700
> From: Mark Boolootian <booloo at ucsc.edu>
> Sender: owner-nanog at merit.edu
> 

> It might be a matter of interpretation.  According to
> http://d.root-servers.org/october21.txt:
> 
>    2.1. Some root name servers were unreachable from many parts of the
>    global Internet due to congestion from the attack traffic delivered
>    upstream/nearby.  While all servers continued to answer all queries they
>    received (due to successful overprovisioning of host resources), many
>    valid queries were unable to reach some root name servers due to attack-
>    related congestion effects, and thus went unanswered.
> 
> While I'm not trying to act as Sclavos' apologist, I think you have to
> be careful about how you respond to this particular claim of his.  You 
> can't dismiss it out-of-hand.  Misleading?  Yes.  Flat out false?  You'd
> have to be more convincing.
> 

Sorry, Mark, but we can. 

The congestion did not take down 9 of 13 servers, which was Scalvos
claim. It did severely impact ALL Internet traffic and traffic to/from
DNS servers was a part of it. 

He did not say that some people could not resolve names. In fact, he
says that they could. He is quoted as saying: "It should scare people
that nine of the 13 went down."  No equivocation in that statement.
No accuracy, either.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634