Technology Today

Cracking The Digg Code

Spam and malware sometimes work together, with malware applications enabling spammers to hijack vulnerable PCs and use them as mail relays. It’s not just web servers that are vulnerable to hacker intrusion, either – an unprotected PC is easy prey as long as it’s connected to the Internet. Hacking is a consistent and perennial threat, and the most prevalent type of ‘hack’ is the Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

Making network intrusion and defaced web pages seem like benign pranks, DoS attacks seek to bring the web’s servers to their knees by flooding the available bandwidth with data. There’s a history of increasingly bold assaults too. Popular news site Digg went dark for half a day due to a DoS attack. More controversially, a range of key Georgian websites – including those of the Georgian President and the National Bank – were taken offline by Russian DoS attacks before the invasion in August 2008.

In this case, there’s little in the way of good news. Though the majority of hack attacks are attributed to ‘script kiddies’ (neophyte programmers armed with downloaded code), there are signs of more sophisticated advances. In a security survey conducted by Arbor Networks, 23 per cent of network operators questioned said that DNS poisoning – the practice of redirecting traffic to another domain – is their most significant concern. A similar number cited client hijacking – which results in ‘zombie PCs’ – as a big headache.

Hackers and crackers are part of a community, sharing exploits and taking part in games of one-upmanship. As fast as patches for operating systems, browsers and servers can be created, new exploits can be found. Controlling the problem is a matter of putting out brush fires, but all it would take is one coordinated, conclusive attack on a set of significant servers for the whole forest to go up in flames.