NSA Website Attacked, Knocked Offline

Grazed from NewsFactor.  Author: David Holmes.

The U.S. National Security Agency’s website, nsa.gov, was knocked offline Friday afternoon, and as of Friday evening, it was still unavailable. Only a browser message indicating that the serverwas not responding appeared.

Sources quoted by various news agencies have speculated that the site has apparently fallen victim to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, and that it was believed that the hacker group Anonymous would claim responsibility. However, as of the time of publication of this report, the group has not claimed responsibility…

DDoS Attacks Still Unstoppable

DDoS attacks are those in which data is sent to a particular server from many clients, with the goal of overwhelming or flooding the server with data and requests. In this manner, the server then becomes too busy to deliver its normal response, such as serving the requested Web page.  In many DDoS attacks, the multitude of requests are sent from computers which have been taken over by hackers through viruses that lie dormant on the computers of unsuspecting users. When the hackers “activate” the viruses and other malware, the users’ computers send the malicious requests to the target server — in this case, that of the NSA…

Read more from the source @ http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=12100006HUGO