Report: Monday's Attack On Internet Was First Of Two

By Mitch Wagner

Monday's distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the Internet's 13 root domain name servers was the first of two attacks that day, both successfully repelled, the Washington Post reported.

The second DDOS attack started at about 11 pm Eastern time, and targeted the name servers for Internet top-level domains including .com, .biz, .info and country-code domains such as .uk for Great Britain and .ca for Canada, the newspaper said.

The name servers attacked include systems run by the UUNET business unit of WorldCom, which handles about half of global Internet traffic; VeriSign, which manages the servers for .com, .net and .org, and Dublin-based Afilias Ltd. The companies said they successfully repelled the attacks.

The earlier attack, launched at about 5 pm Eastern time against the Internet's 13 top-level DNS servers, had little impact.