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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BirdDog who wrote (17609)	2/10/2000 2:43:00 AM
From: Dinesh	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

RaPle I believe the recent attacks on yahoo ebay etc did not involve any security breach but were at TCP/IP level. The "hackers" simply bombarded the sites with meaningless requests creating a traffic jam. They apparently didn't care so much for the information retrieved. It is of course possible that this was a trojan horse but no one is saying they lost sensitive data. Yet. Security software, firewall etc do not offer protection against this sort of attack. For the protection to work, the server must receive the incoming IP packet, analyze it, and then determine that the request is from a known bad source and drop the request. But this takes away valuable bandwidth and CPU cycles. Bingo! Going at the router level, should one decide to block the rogue IP addresses, may not work either. The smarties can spoof the IP address in the packet header, and continually spoof it to cover a wide IP address spectrum -- so that blocking by IP addresses may mean blocking out big part of the country. Once again, bingo! The ISP may recognize the traffic patterns and may be able to take some action, blocking off paths that send huge amounts of traffic all of a sudden. This is of course easier said than done since this requires co-ordinated detection and action over a very long pipeline possibly spanning several ISPs. It's truly a mind game. I am not implying that there is no merit to the security stocks. But how will Checkpoint or Keynote will benefit from this is unclear. One interesting thing that stands out is that there was no bandwidth starvation at the ISP level. This is very heartening. At least until more details come out. Regards Dinesh