Al-Jazeera struggles against continued attacks

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Al-Jazeera, the Middle Eastern news network, is likely to remain inaccessible via the Internet for as long as online vandals continue to deluge the company's Web sites with data, security experts said on Thursday. The news network's Arabic and English Web sites remained inaccessible for the third day in a row, according to Internet performance measurement service Keynote Systems. The sites had technical problems at the beginning of the week, but those glitches were quickly surpassed in seriousness by a distributed denial-of-service attack that began on Tuesday. Such an attack clogs a network's bandwidth with a continuous flood of data that is nearly indistinguishable from that normally created by Web users. "There is nothing a small organisation can really do to survive a denial-of-service attack," said Chris Wysopal, director of research and development for digital security firm @Stake. "Generally, only a large organisation can survive such an attack." While many disagree with the nature of Al-Jazeera's coverage of the war in Iraq, others have argued that the news service provides a valuable Arab perspective on the war. The attack may prove that a few online vandals can censor all but the largest media companies, foreshadowing difficult times for independent media on the Web, Wysopal said. "What does that say about who has a voice on the Internet?" he asked. "The ones with the last word will be the big guys with the ability to pay for bandwidth." A distributed denial-of-service attack is normally launched from a large number of computers -- often from home PCs with broadband connections -- that have been compromised by an online vandal. Large networks of these PCs, commonly referred to as zombies, can be controlled by issuing commands on the Internet relay chat network, the precursor to today's popular instant messaging networks. An attack that mimics requests for Web pages and apparently comes from random Internet addresses is almost impossible to stop without the help of the backbone Internet providers, said Paul Mockapetris, chief scientist for Internet infrastructure company Nominum. "You have to track it back," he said. "These attacks have happened to eBay and the like. You have to figure out which packets are legitimate and which are not. You have to get your Internet service provider to backtrack where it came from." Al-Jazeera hasn't made much progress in defeating the online attacks. According to Keynote Systems, both the Arabic site and the new English-language site became completely inaccessible at 10:00 p.m. PST on Tuesday. On Thursday, attackers replaced the online records kept by Internet domain registrar Network Solutions, a subsidiary of VeriSign, with data that pointed to a different site that featured an American flag and proclaimed, "Let Freedom Ring". There may be little that the Qatar-based news network can do except wait for hackers to lose interest, @Stake's Wysopal said. "The (attack) will continue, no matter where they move their infrastructure to," he said. "And I don't think there is that much that they can do about that. A lot of times, it takes a network provider that will go to bat for you and help you out." Emails to Al-Jazeera have gone unanswered, but VeriSign spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy said his company has been working with the news network to fix the site's domain name service (DNS) problems. The FBI has opened an investigation into the DNS redirect that sent surfers who entered the Al-Jazeera Web addresses to a fake, pro-American site, said a bureau representative.

For everything Internet-related, from the latest legal and policy-related news, to domain name updates, see ZDNet UK's Internet News Section. Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom.

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