Brief: Lufthansa fights off denial-of-service attack

Computerworld - German airline Lufthansa AG said today that it successfully defended itself against a denial-of-service attack from demonstrators protesting the company's role in the deportation of illegal aliens.
This morning, in a planned attack, demonstrators began accessing Lufthansa's Web site. Although demonstrators claim that they knocked the site off-line for about 10 minutes, Lufthansa said the claim was untrue.
A spokeswoman for the Cologne, Germany-based airline said that although it took longer to access than normal for a brief period of time, the Web site never went down completely. She said that because the attack had been planned, Lufthansa was able to make preparations to defend itself against the protest.
But the German Web site http://de.indymedia.org/demo indicated that Lufthansa's servers got 67,004 hits per second at one point in the two-hour Web attack.
The attack was planned to protest Lufthansa's contract with the German government to fly people who are denied asylum in Germany out of the country.
Related stories:

• Denial-of-service warning put out by FBI cybercrime agency, May 7, 2001


• Canada to consider licensing cell phone jammers, March 6, 2001


• No easy defense vs. denial-of-service attacks, Feb. 12, 2001

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