A Romanian teenager bent on revenge brought significant portions of the Undernet and several Internet service providers to a halt over the weekend when he launched a series of ping and syn flood attacks.
The unidentified youth launched syn flood attacks against at least five hubs operated worldwide by the Internet Relay Chat network Undernet, obliterated an Internet service provider's server in Oslo, Norway, and took down servers operated by AOL, said Undernet system administrators. The FBI's computer crimes division is investigating the incidents.
"We have some of the greatest minds in Internet technology here, and they couldn't do anything [to stop the attack]," said Angel, an UnderNet operator who would not give her last name.
AOL representatives were unavailable for comment on the extent of damage they incurred.
Angel said the attack began Saturday when the unidentified youth telnetted from Romania to FishNet, a Ventura, California-based Internet service provider. Once he obtained highest-level "root" access at FishNet, the youth launched at least two ping attacks - one against his former Internet service provider, the Romania-based Logicnet, and another against a UUNet service in New York.
"Fortunately, he wasn't too bright because he left a lot of trails," said Bill Benefield, a system administrator with FishNet.
Benefield said the youth entered FishNet services via news and mail server daemons, leaving his electronic footprints in the server logs.
The youth, who is believed to be between 16 and 19 years of age, then went on a juggernaut across the global network, stopping first at ISPs in Oslo, London and other parts of the UK, as well as hitting Chicago ISP Napnet.
At each stop, the youth would log onto the server, obtain root access, then delete files, canceling accounts. In some cases, it wiped out the entire businesses such as the ISP in Oslo, Angel said.
