Hackers target Internet root servers

San Francisco -- In what experts called one of the worst internet attacks since 2002, unknown hackers on Tuesday targeted three of the 13 root servers that direct traffic on the internet, disabling them for 12 hours before computer scientists overcame the problem.

The attack overwhelmed the powerful computers by bombarding them with huge amounts of data. But the servers that were not affected took over the task of redirecting the legitimate traffic, meaning that the disruption passed largely unnoticed by the vast majority of net users.

The hackers targeted a company called UltraDNS which runs the servers that manage traffic to web sites ending in the .info and .org suffixes.

UltraDNS chief executive Ben Petro told ComputerWire that its network was "really, really, really tested."

"We have not seen an attack act in this fashion with this methodology before," said Petro, who revealed that up to two million packets per second were flooded into its servers. "We are at risk, e-commerce is at risk and to an extent the global economy is at risk."

John Crain, chief technical officer for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said the incident was one of the most serious since an October 2002 attack on the 13 root servers of the Internet.

Crain said that improved technology enabling the servers to distribute their workloads to other computers around the globe had minimized the effect of the latest attack.