You can distribute this document freely, as long as no changes are made to the file, or as long as someone else does not pretend credit for it. All comments and suggestions about the material presented here should be directed at [email protected]. If future versions of this document include add-ons coming from other people than me, then proper credit to the various authors will be clearly identified. All version updates of this document are to be released by me.
You can find it online at http://www.geocities.com/floydian_99/
The goal of this paper is to present the concepts that can (and most probably will) be used in the near future to perpetrate a distributed denial of service attack of such proportions that the attacks that Mafiaboy is accused of will seem like a drop of water in the ocean. I have called such a potential attack Babel, from the tower of the same name found in the Bible. The book has it that the creation of languages was a punition from God to men, who was irate that men would try to reach the sky with the Babel tower. It resulted that it created confusion amongst mankind, preventing them to collaborate in such grandiose projects in the future.
Preface
Things have never been perfect on the Internet, but way back then (before the Internet went commercial), it still wasn't so bad. The only major outbreak I could remember from the "old days" is the Morris worm, and even then, it's because I read about it, but I didn't find that much information from this era concerning major outbreaks. And back then, "major" meant maybe 2000-3000 Unix machines; nothing compared to today's viruses like Melissa and I Love You. Another popular trend amongst Internet vandals is denial of service attacks. In this paper, I will present several ways someone can combine virus techniques and denial of service attacks in order to create the biggest threat on the Internet, a traffic storm that could paralyze the Internet for days, maybe even weeks. Who knows, maybe forever?
This document is presented to anyone who has interests in computer security, denial of service attacks, viruses and Trojan horses, networking and computing in general.