We all yearn for the more innocent time when the acronym DOS stood for your Disk Operating System, or even the Dept. of State for the better traveled. Today, however, it is a term that brings a chill to many technologists . . .
We all yearn for the more innocent time when the acronym DOS stood for your Disk Operating System, or even the Dept. of State for the better traveled. Today, however, it is a term that brings a chill to many technologists -- Denial of Service. Initially, this was largely the realm of minor miscreants, who wanted no more than to target specific Web sites they thought would be cool to disrupt. But now a greater chill has begun to set in as a result of the selective targeting of routers.

Of late, the hacker community has taken to discussing 'router protocol attacks' in listservs, Usenet, and at conferences. Attacks against routers can have serious consequences for the Internet at large. Routers can be used for direct attacks against the routing protocols that interconnect the networks comprising the Internet, therefore causing serious service availability issues on a large scale. By dealing with such threats to their infrastructures, network managers will be protecting both their own interests and the interests of all networks to which they connect.

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