Hackers weave a net, force Yahoo breakdown

Hackers weave a net, force Yahoo breakdown

CALIFORNIA: Yahoo Inc's popular web portal was shut down for nearly three hours on Monday because of what company officials described as ``a coordinated attack designed to take down the site''.

The Santa Clara, California, company said the planned attack came from more than 50 different Internet addresses and created such demand in a short period of time that it was unable to serve all the web pages that were requested. Yahoo President and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Mallet said in an interview on CNBC that the attack was ``wickedly simple'', but the deluge was so great that at one point the mock requests to access Yahoo's network came at the rate of a gigabyte per second.

Mallet said the attack wasn't a widespread Internet attack but was specifically directed at a company server located in Mountain View, California.

Mallet said most of Yahoo's core services are backed up so that not all of the company's service was shut down. Company engineers worked quickly to identify the problem and installed asystem of filters that can distinguish between real requests for information and fake requests.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the shutdown started at 1:45 p.m. EST and affected all of the company's sites except for its free e-mail service, e-commerce store and web-site hosting service called GeoCities. In the past, the company has suffered from technical problems that cut access to parts of its web network, but those outages were isolated to one or two parts of the network and didn't last as long.

Indeed, Yahoo said Monday's shutdown was its first significant one. It isn't uncommon for Internet companies to suffer technical glitches or electrical outages that freeze their networks and prevent users from accessing web sites. Online auctioneer eBay Inc of San Jose, California, for instance, has experienced several such shutdowns.

Because Yahoo uses such advanced encryption technology to protect its databases, the only route for attackers is to attack from the outside, said Gene Shklar, Vice-President ofPublic Services at Keynote Systems Inc, a San Mateo, California, firm that measures the speed and reliability of web sites. ``If you can't get a bomb into the building, you create traffic jams in roads leading to the building,'' he explained.

However, underscoring the severity of the incident, the company relies on an outside firm called GlobalCenter Inc to host its servers and to take precautions to circumvent such attacks. A spokeswoman for GlobalCenter said that since the requests to the Yahoo servers stored in GlobalCenter's data centre appeared to be normal requests from regular users, it is difficult to assess who and where the attackers are. But she said the attackers didn't change any information on Yahoo's Web sites.

A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's San Francisco office said its computer-intrusion squad is aware of the incident. ``We are in the process of getting in touch with Yahoo,'' said FBI agent George Grotz. ``It would appear that there has been some sort of denial ofservice and that it would meet the threshold.'' In cases of computer hacking, there must be at least a $5,000 loss for it to be a federal crime.

--The Wall Street Journal