Quote:
Originally posted by patentparanyc
You know, in addition, what's up with Suze Orman's face being there everytime I log in, WHEN I can log in.....she is one unattractive bug-eyed woman. What's the point of being rich if you look like you're jumping out of your skin........
fix tag-rt
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I keep getting Paige's face. Who is Suze?
I guess it was a roll out that unfortuantely came at the same time as a web attack:
Attack Blocks Access to Popular Web Sites
41 minutes ago Add Technology - washingtonpost.com to My Yahoo!
By Brian Krebs, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
A widespread electronic attack on a company that handles traffic for some of the world's most-visited Web sites knocked several high-profile sites offline for at least 45 minutes early Tuesday.
•The attack targeted Internet servers run by Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies, which distributes and manages Web data for companies such as Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), Federal Express and Xerox Corp. It also handles traffic for the FBI (news - web sites) and washingtonpost.com.
Akamai spokesman Jeff Young said the attack interrupted service to the Web sites around 9 a.m. ET and lasted for just under an hour. All the sites are currently accessible.
Young said that the attack was targeted at the Internet infrastructure on a large scale, and that "We have no reason to believe that the attack was directed solely at Akamai."
Amit Yoran, chief cybersecurity officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said federal authorities are working with Akamai and the companies that operate the Internet's underlying infrastructure to determine the source of the attack.
One of those companies, Ashburn, Va.-based MCI, noticed no unusual traffic on its network, a spokeswoman said.
Akamai manages high-traffic Web sites by storing its 1,100 customers' Web content on thousands of Internet servers around the world. It manages approximately 15 percent of the traffic on the Internet.
Young said that most of the sites that were affected are search engines that use Akamai's services.
The company's important role makes it an attractive target for hackers who use "distributed denial-of-service attacks" -- huge bursts of data sent by computers that they have taken over -- to overwhelm computer servers and render popular Web sites inaccessible to Internet users.
Akamai's clients often can withstand these data blasts because attackers must knock out all of Akamai's thousands of servers before they can claim success. Microsoft, one of Akamai's biggest customers, used the company's service to keep its Web site online last August, when the "Blaster" worm told infected computers to attack Microsoft's Windows security site.
Young said the attack seemed to be designed to interfere with its "DNS servers" that convert numerical Internet addresses into more recognizable names like "www.microsoft.com."
"Essentially an attacker would need to have enough [compromised computers] under his control to knock out the thousands of Akamai servers and achieve the kind of global outage we saw today," Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for the Bethesda, Md.-based SANS Institute.
Ullrich said the assault was most likely launched from an army of home computers infected with a virus or worm that gives attackers full control over the machines, which can then be used to send out spam or crippling Internet attacks like today's assault on Akamai.
Security experts have been warning about the growing number of computers infected with such programs. One of the most aggressive and powerful such programs, called "Phatbot," has already spread to millions of machines over the past several months.
Russ Cooper, chief scientist at TruSecure Corp. in Herndon, Va., said the attack probably involved "at least tens of thousands of systems that would be needed to busy Akamai's network so much."
Cooper said the attackers also might have targeted a previously unknown design flaw in Akamai's software.
The company said that a similar incident last month was caused by a software flaw in one of its Web site management programs.
Computer security experts and law enforcement authorities said that it is often extremely difficult to find out who is responsible for denial-of-service attacks.
In October 2002, a denial-of-service attack disabled most of the 13 "root servers" that provide the primary roadmap for almost all Internet communications. The Department of Homeland Security is still trying to find out who launched that attack, Yoran said.
