A 15-year-old Canadian boy who goes by the handle "Mafiaboy" has been arrested and awaits trial in connection with the CNN.com attack. This sort of attack happened to several popular Web sites in February, including Yahoo!, ZDNet, Buy.com, Amazon and CNN.com.
To a user, the target Web site seems to be inoperable. With so much bogus data coming in, the target cannot handle legitimate traffic. Those programs force their host computers to flood the target computer with data. Then the attacker remotely triggers the client programs, assigning them a target.
This can happen days or months before the attack is to occur. However, a check of the engine showed that mstream needs far fewer zombie computers in order to disrupt a target.Ī DDoS attack works by first surreptitiously placing client programs on a multitude of computers connected to the Internet, turning them into zombies. They released their separate analysis on Tuesday.ĭavid Dittrich of the University of Washington saw what he called a "primitive" version of the program, still fraught with bugs and missing features common to the genre.
Super ddos tool code#
The X-Force team, as the research arm of Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems is known, got hold of part of the code last Thursday and immediately posted an antidote. This prompted a University of Washington researcher to release an analysis of the tool on Monday, earlier than he planned.
The mstream source code was posted to open, unmoderated mailing lists on Saturday.