I just received an email newsletter from Steve Gibson, who has produced a number of interesting web-security programs. It includes a description of an "attack" that closed down Steve's website several times last May. I understand very little of the details about bots and Zombies and IRC ports and raw sockets, but it reads as a fascinating detective story, with some sobering conclusions.

Apparently this attack occurred when a 13-year-old in Wisconsin commandeered several hundred PC's across the country and got them all to send massive amounts of meaningless data to this particular website server, clogging its connections to the web and effectively shutting it down. The 13-year-old was angry because he had heard a rumor that Steve had "insulted" him and his friends in a discussion group. The software he used to disable the site was written by a "master hacker", and is freely available to anybody who would know how to use it.

The more worrisome part is that, according to Steve Gibson, the new and upcoming Microsoft operating systems (Windows 2000 and XP) are configured so as to make it very easy for hackers to take over the machines that run them (the ones you and I might be buying in the next couple of years for our own humdrum use), and create major havoc on the Net.

I should make it clear that I don't know Steve personally, and I have no way of independently verifying his statements, but from looking through his website he sounds like an intelligent and concerned person, not a wild-eyed nut.

I'm only marginally above the baseline when it comes to computer literacy, but after reading this story--including transcripts of messages from the 13-year-old and from the one who created the malicious programs--I'm concerned.

Perhaps some of you who can understand this stuff could offer some informed commentary.

Here's the story.

Aloha,
Mark