Hacker Accused For Attack On Akamai Botnet

32-year-old John Bombard of Seminole, Florida is accused with breaking into 2 computer systems to make a botnet of zombie personal computers. This was done to attack Akamai, an online content distributor and business processor. As per FBI, Bombard attacked these systems by using a type of GAOBOT worm.

Bot network that was integrated to attack Akamai was comprised of 2 major universities' PCs (the names are not known). FBI said that Bombard redirected the communication from the computer systems of universities to bot network from a system placed on his domain, f0r.org.

Bot networks or botnets are assembling of hundreds of computer systems. These systems are compromised by programs particularly designed to form a computer network that can be exploited to install a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack, among other functions.

DDOS attack was launched on June 15, 2005 and made Websites of many clients of Akamai temporarily inaccessible. The hacker sent the mischievous traffic to the domain name system servers (DNS) of Akamai, which had a battering effect on the customers of Akamai. Net users were unable to reach sites hosted by Akamai or they had difficulty in reaching the site.

The accusations of hacking or breaking into a protected system without authorization intentionally carry possible penalties of imprisonment of upto 2 years and a fine of $ 200000.

A DoS attack on a network or computer system consumes the bandwidth of target network or overloads its computing resources. Hence, users suffer an overall loss of service. Generally these attacks are planted via DDOS efforts in many compromised machines that are instructed to function synchronously against the targeted system or network.

The botnet controllers are increasingly using sophisticated tactics. In summer, major attacks were planted but hackers have maintained their zombie troops by devising new worms. Meanwhile, manufacturers of Web browser are longing to introduce better secure upgrades, such as Microsoft IE 7 and Firefox 2.0.

Related article: Hacker & Virus in MySpace

» SPAMfighter News - 10/27/2006