Hacker charged

Date: October 25, 2006
Source: prnewswire.com


A Florida man was charged today in federal court with hacking into two computer systems as part of establishing a "bot" network of compromised computers from which launched a denial of service attack on computer servers managed by Akamai Technologies.

United States Attorney Michael J. Sullivan and Kenneth W. Kaiser, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New England, announced today that JOHN BOMBARD, age 32, of Seminole, Florida, was charged in an Information today with two counts of Intentionally Accessing a Protected Computer Without Authorization.

Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, distributes online content and business processes over a network of computer servers. The Information alleges that on June 15, 2004, Akamai suffered a significant increase in web traffic to a number of its domain name system ("DNS") servers, which translate written Internet addresses, such as http://www.example.com, into numeric addresses, such as 123.45.678.90, for use by computers. This increase in web traffic was caused by a distributed denial of service ("DDOS") attack against Akamai's Global Traffic Management DNS servers.

A denial of service attack on a computer system or network causes a loss of service to users by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading its computational resources. Commonly such attacks are implemented through the distribution of the denial of service efforts among many compromised computers, which are instructed to act simultaneously against the victim network or system. The Akamai DNS servers targeted in the DDOS attack served numerous Akamai customers. The affected Akamai customers had access to their respective web sites slowed or rendered inaccessible for a period of time.
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