Q&A: Tom Leighton, chief scientist at Akamai

He talked about the nature of yesterday's apparent DDoS attack

By Jaikumar Vijayan

June 16, 2004 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Akamai Technologies Inc. said today that the Domain Name System problems it encountered yesterday were the result of a sophisticated and targeted distributed denial-of-service attack against the company. In an interview with Computerworld, Tom Leighton, the company's chief scientist, talked about what happened.

What was the nature of the yesterday's attack? It was a name server attack against four of our customers for whom we carry their name servers. Our assumption was this was an attack against Akamai and it was perpetrated by attacking our customer name service infrastructure. It is not impossible that this was a coordinated attack against those four Web sites. Akamai has a lot of key customers, and it could just be a coincidence that the four happened to be Akamai customers. [But] we are assuming it was an attack against Akamai.
Why were only four major customers affected? Actually, we had more than those four customers impacted. About 4% of our customer base [of about 1,100 customers] had the potential to be impacted by it. Half of them did not have any noticeable impact. There was a set of servers that experienced the brunt of the attack. The servers did not go down, but their ability to perform was severely hampered. They were giving out valid information, but for a small subset of customers, the performance was not there.
Has the source of the attack been identified and the attack traffic stopped? That's information that we are sharing with the authorities. But the attack traffic has been eliminated.
What's happened since the attack? We've had a chance to analyze the attack. We have put out several additional defensive mechanisms in place because there is a security concern. Going forward, we are continuing to place additional mechanisms in place. DNS is a critical component of the Internet and in general one of the most vulnerable. We've put a lot into securing our name server infrastructure. We have learned from this incident.
Is there any indication that someone with inside knowledge could have been responsible? It was sophisticated and very large-scale, but it did not require insider knowledge. We have no reason to believe an insider was involved.
Could the incident have been caused by an internal technology problem? Our systems performed normally, as they are designed to perform. It is because of this that it didn't impact more of our customer base.

Recommend Digg Twitter ShareThis

Email Print Send Feedback Reprints

Additional Resources

POLL RESULTS

Leading IT Pros Weigh In on Top IT Issues

Accelerate your knowledge of the IT world you inhabit by viewing the results of a series of polls taken by your IT peers. These polls of 100+ IT professionals each are available for full viewing. They cover key topics such as virtualization, processor performance, green IT, cloud computing and many others. Be a part of the buzz.

WHITE PAPER

For Best Results, Think Beyond the Box

Technology is complex. Keeping it running productively shouldn't be. To that end, you want to minimize the number of solutions needed in-house to simplify operations, maintenance, and support. Kodak offers a best-practices model. One company provides support for both scanner and software, for fast problem resolution without vendor finger-pointing. Download now!

WHITE PAPER

Accelerating the Path to Demand Intelligence with a Demand Signal Repository

Utilizing demand intelligence improves the precision of pricing, product assortments, channel/store placement, and promotion, which are all essential for sustainable revenue management performance. Learn more, download this free whitepaper today.

White Papers & Webcasts

Centralized Data Backup and Your WAN
Is your organization prepared to tackle the massive challenge of protecting your data in a cost effective and timely manner? With a growing...

Why Compliance Pays
This OnDemand webcast explores the relationship that firms with best compliance records have higher revenue, greater customer retention, lower financial losses from data...

An All-in-One Approach to Web Security
Granting web access to employees poses challenges to IT administrators and introduces unique security risks. Even as companies have perfected their security techniques...

Best Practices for Managing Business Risks from the Use of IT
(Source: Symantec) Based on exhaustive benchmarks conducted by the IT Policy Compliance, this session highlights the relationship between business risks and use of...

The Hidden Dangers of Spam
Beyond the well-understood productivity drain that spam inflicts on businesses, threats posed by illicit email circulating through a network are causing many security...

Managing And Protecting Your Ever Increasing Mobile Assets
(Source: Absolute Software) Your users are becoming more mobile each day. This is great for productivity - yet challenging for IT control. Natalie...

Open Source Security Myths Dispelled
(Source: Astaro) Open Source Software is computer software whose source code is available to the general public. This openly viewable nature...

Sun OpenSSO Enterprise Webinar
(Source: Sun) This webinar replay discusses Sun OpenSSO Enterprise innovation--the single, open-source solution that helps your business solve the challenges around internal access...

Best Practices for Backing Up VMware® with Veritas NetBackup™
VMware® is used by enterprises large and small to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations. With this in mind, Symantec...

Agile Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for Rapid ROI
(Source: IBM) Content rich business processes are a core feature of daily operations at just about any organization today. Very often these essential...

All White Papers | All Webcasts