Hackers are stealing your Time Warner Internet connection!
For the last couple of nights, my home Internet connection has been totally fercockt. (You know what that means. Even if you don’t know, you know.) I thought it was because I buy the bottom-of-the-barrel, slowest broadband connection Timer Warner will sell me, but apparently there were hackers in our Internets, stealin’ our bandwidth.
Time Warner issued a press release this morning announcing that they’ve been getting hammered by hackers for the past seven days, causing massive slow downs on their systems all over Southern California. The hackers used a denial of service attack focused on the domain-name servers, the part of the Internet that translates web site names into computer-readable numbers. The particular style of attack made it seem like users were getting normal errors (though too many of them), which is why it’s taken TW a while to catch on. They haven’t actually caught anyone yet, but they’re still investigating. Our Internet nightmare may not be over.
It should be mentioned for those less tech savy readers out there, your computers weren’t put at harm by this attack. It just made most things you do on the internet really slow.
Most articles I’m reading on this are giving the impression this is limited to southern California, I’m in Missouri and have been feeling the effects for the same period, tonight it’s the worst. (I’m glad it could happen when KZ2 is released for PS3, no wonder I have time to post about this.)
I found someone posting a reply talking about Time Warner’s shipping jobs over seas as being the reason for the attacks. I would like to voice the following everywhere I can in response to that person:
Everywhere we are hearing about unemployment numbers here in the USA reaching 8%, and with the government extending entitlements to those out of work. I would like everyone to follow the train of thought here:
I have lost my job. I have technical abilities to launch a massive attack like this. I am going to use my abilities to launch such an attack instead of using my resources to get another job.
Whoever launched this attack does have extensive technical abilities, and it’s no wonder the economy is in such terrible shape if that is the response our capable workers have whenever they lose their jobs.
This person has the ability to make an enormous revenue stream of their own, but chose to make life miserable for people using the service. This does not hurt the company — they still collect for services rendered despite the attacks — it hurts the AMERICAN PEOPLE using the service they are “fighting for.”
I am now off the soap box, but consider the train of thought, with their entitlements increasing to where they can still afford internet service to launch their attacks, why should they get a job? Think of the intelligence that is at work here destroying something instead of creating a product others want to buy in a recession… hmm…
This explains so much! So many problems earlier this week it was driving me batty!
still going on