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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (40892)	1/27/2001 8:14:38 AM
From: Steve Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Not sure I follow your logic there. I asked you what ROOT-NETWORK.COM has to do with Microsoft and you deduce from that my being an NT admin. Can you answer the question? And I am not sure how the article you quoted (about thursday's outages) has any relevance to our discussion of the DNS root servers problems on Tuesday. Fianlly, concerning Thursday's outages, the press might describe them as "hackers" but hacking involves gaining access to a machine or network without authority. Some denial of service attacks take advantages of software vulnerabilities and could be called "hacking". The problems MS had on Thursday where not from such hacking but were similar to the denial of service suffered by Yahoo etc last year. The results of this attack would be the same whether it was MS, Sun, my company or yours.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (40892)	1/29/2001 11:10:42 AM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

"M$FT DNS SERVERS HACKED!! ALL SITES DOWN SINCE TUE EVENING!!! Check this out for a good laugh:" - cheryl williamson Message 15239898 "Oh yeah?? Does this look like a legit domain name to you?? MICROSOFT.COM.HACKED.BY.PSYKOJOKO.ON.A.ROOT-NETWORK.COM: These were broadcast on the net, you must have been asleep..." - cheryl williamson Message 15248146 "You must be an NT admin:" - cheryl williamson Message 15253497 You must be clueless. Do you work for Sun? Read on... Whois search provides no clues to Microsoft outage By Robert Lemos ZDNet News January 27, 2001 12:41 PM PT A practical joke misled many amateur investigators this week into prematurely believing that Microsoft's massive Web outage was the result of an attack. A technical glitch caused many of Microsoft's major Web sites to disappear from the Web late Tuesday and for most of Wednesday, sending hordes of amateur investigators to the Internet in an attempt to ascertain what happened. One common, albeit fallible, tool is a simple Whois search. A search for "Microsoft.com" using any of several of the Whois servers, which list information on each domain name on the Internet, returned 23 other domain names as well, such as: MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD. GIVE.UP.BECAUSE. LINUXISGOD.COM and MICROSOFT.COM.IS. SECRETLY.RUN.BY. ILLUMINATI.TERRORISTS.NET. Many people thought this indicated a hack. In reality, the bogus domain names are the result of online vandals who take advantage of the way many Whois servers work. Most Whois servers will return all domain names that have the same text as the search term. For example, if a person searches for "Microsoft.com," every domain name that contains the string "Microsoft.com" will be listed. That not only includes Microsoft's home domain name, but also strings such as those above. As a result, such a search will return this domain name: MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD.COM. But this is not a Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) domain name--it belongs to the LinuxIsGod.com domain name. Gaming connection speculated In addition to the Whois red herring, amateur sleuths speculated that Microsoft was attacked as a result of a battle between the administrators of the company's online role-playing game, Asheron's Call, and some game-playing hackers. "Late Monday night, a bug was discovered that allowed players to intentionally crash the server their characters were on," the Asheron's Call team said in a letter to players Tuesday, the day the Microsoft sites first went down. "The players who were discovered repeatedly abusing this bug to bring down the servers are being removed from the game." Many rumormongers speculated that the booted players were attacking Microsoft in retribution. In reality, Microsoft said its own technicians were responsible for the nearly 24-hour outage. On Thursday, many of the company's Web sites were once again inaccessible -- this time the result of attackers. zdnet.com