Microsoft outages result of DoS

From: Jim Whitehead (ejw@cse.ucsc.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 26 2001 - 13:39:39 PST


http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201-4615691-0.html

CNET News.com received several e-mails from readers Friday morning noting
that access to Microsoft's sites was sporadic. The company's sites, which
collectively rank as the third most-visited destinations on the Web, include
MSN.com, Hotmail.com, Microsoft.com, Expedia.com, Carpoint.com and
Encarta.com.

The outage may be another denial-of-service attack, this time against
Microsoft's servers, said Keynote's Todd.

"It does not appear to be a glitch; it appears to be due to excessive
traffic," he said. "If it is a DoS attack this time, it's a DoS attack
against their Web servers. Yesterday, it was against their routers."

While it seems that Microsoft made some network configuration mistakes that
left them vulnerable to this kind of attack, I suspect that many other sites
are also vulnerable as well. It's pretty amazing that one of the highest
traffic Web sites can be DoS'ed.

- Jim



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