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[IP] more on Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read News Alerts





Begin forwarded message:

From: "Patrick W.Gilmore" <patrick@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 16, 2004 1:38:20 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: "Patrick W.Gilmore" <patrick@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] Blackout hits major Web sites|ZDNet Must-Read News Alerts

DISCLAIMER: I work for Akamai Technologies.

Which is also why I know Mr. Song is showing himself to be an idiot, making sweeping accusations on assumptions which do not correlate to reality.

--
TTFN,
patrick


On Jun 15, 2004, at 4:53 PM, David Farber wrote:

Blackout hits major Web sites

Google, Microsoft.com and others go dark after an apparent outage of
Akamai's domain name server system. Yahoo Mail still patchy.

http://ct.com.com/click?q=c8-2lPnQWOJdK75YyzznoSPFel9u29R

This is brilliant:

<quote>
"It was definitely some sort of Akamai issue," Song said in an interview. "Their name service for all these major sites stopped working. You couldn't reach these sites, even though the sites were up. You just couldn't get to them because the name resolution wasn't working."

Furthermore, Song noticed that Web-wide traffic during the outage actually declined, making it unlikely that Google and the other sites were the victims of a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which thousands of unknowing PC "slaves" would have flooded their servers with useless data or requests for data.
</quote>

Did Mr. Song consider the possibility that the DoS attack was pointed at the name servers? Especially since both Keynote and Akamai mention that there was an attack on Akamai's name service. And if so, wouldn't that have the effect of lowering "Web-wide traffic"? He himself admits that users cannot get to web sites if the name resolution is not working.

Not sure I would want to purchase products from a security company whose "security architect" does not understand the interaction between DNS and HTTP....

--
TTFN,
patrick

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