>>Not exactly vfp, but can someone explain exactly how these "hackers" are bringing the major sites down? The news reports are confusing - one report looks like slamming, another more like SQL overloads, another "death-by-pinging", another hacking into a network... Or is this still something of a secret?
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>Bruce, ignore my previous blathering on... here it is from
>http://www.zdnet.com/zdhelp/stories/main/0,5594,2434548,00.html
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>Like most DoS attacks, these attacks overran the Web sites with continuous streams of poorly formed IP packets. Here's what happens: an attacking machine generates what appear to be normal messages, such as the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets. In the case of a UDP DoS attack, these packets claim to come from the same server that's receiving them. In trying to respond to this influx of miscommunication, the victimized server eventually becomes unable to accept any more connections.
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Thanks, gentlemen. This link looks pretty good, I'll read more of it tomorrow. My ISP has been *almost* down, really choking, the last couple hours, now we'll be wondering about these attacks everytime something like this occurs...

Maybe I'll poke around a little as Bill suggested - I'm kind of curious to see what some of this code might look like...

A question, though, what is to prevent these "hackers" from using the massive-SQL method? We found it fairly easy to bring a Sybase server down with massive SQL in testing (and a few times not in testing). It seems like they could use the same rough technique to tie things up...