NYT DOS'd

Khoder bin Hakkin hakkin at sarin.com
Wed Oct 31 08:31:20 PST 2001


Tuesday October 30 7:21 PM ET

NY Times Computers Shut Down by Apparent Attack

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Internet connections at the New York Times Co
(NYSE:NYT - news) were interrupted for
several hours on Tuesday afternoon after the paper's computers were
flooded with bogus information in an apparent
attack.

``We don't know that it was malicious, but there seems to be no innocent
explanation,'' wrote network administrator
Terry Schwadron in an e-mail to newsroom employees.

The Times computers ``started receiving a huge amount of electronic
transmission that flooded the machinery that
protects the paper from hacker attacks,'' according to Schwadron's
e-mail, in what he called ``denial of service activity.''

In a denial of service attack, thousands of fake messages are sent to
server computers, tying up the recipient's network.
The main White House Web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov) was hit with a
similar attack in May.

The New York Times Web site (http://www.nytimes.com) was online as of
Tuesday evening.

A spokeswoman for the company, reading a statement, said: ''Some New
York Times employees are experiencing
difficulty accessing the Internet through their computers. Our technical
staff is trying to determine the reason for this. At
this time, we do not know the cause.''

The spokeswoman did confirm the contents of Schwadron's e-mail.

The New York Times has gone through two anthrax scares since Oct. 12,
but tests came up negative for the bacteria.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20011030/wr/media_newyorktimes_computers_dc_1.html





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