Comments from the weblog lake effect about this week’s DoS attacks on prominent websites. I agree; we’re going to continue to see this happening, it’s so absurdly easy to do, it seems. “The big media are missing the key point on this DoS Hell Week. The

computer security of the sites attacked — Amazon, Yahoo, CNN, et cetera —

is not in question. The cause of these attacks is lax security on possibly as

many as 100,000 compromised sites where the hackers install their proxy

tools. These tools — which can be effective with as few as 100 compromised

sites — are the result of security research in the last year that turned up a

variety of Denial-of-Service Tools and techniques (here documented at

CERT). In short, this was a problem that was simmering quietly on the stove

while almost nobody paid attention — until this week, when the techniques

began to be used for the first time against high-profile sites. This problem

will only get worse, as the number of poorly-managed systems with 24/7 net

connections continues to rise. New products like Norton Internet Security (a

one-PC firewall) will help — except in this case, where the compromised

systems are Unix-based. I don’t know of one at this moment, but a Windows

client can’t be far behind.”