Whole Internet under attack on Sat morning in US

Saturday, January 25, 2003 by Dave Winer.

An interesting morning 

I was up early today, and was fresh when news of a massive denial of service attack on the entire Internet came over National Public Radio news.

"Hmmm, funny place to hear that," I said to myself, but then realized it was because my email isn't working. Later we learned that the email is out because of the attack. They're not unrelated.

With the help of readers world wide, and CNN, BBC, Slashdot, Beta News and Google, we are now informed and on top of the story.

Quick fix 

To system managers who may be enjoying a relaxing weekend, away from their servers, a quick fix comes from Freedom.Org. "Firewall port 1434/UDP traffic, and reboot the affected SQL servers."

That should shut down the virus that's causing the havoc, if it has infected any machines on your local network.

We're gathering all the links on Scripting News as they come in.

Dave Winer

PS: Of course Murphy's Law struck both this piece and my brain, the former sooner than the latter. My intention was to have this story go out via email to draw system managers to the Web. But the mail server was down because of the virus. Oooops.