Commentary

Newly discovered vulnerabilities in TCP could take down data centers

Vendors are scrambling to rectify a bag of nasty vulnerabilities in TCP that appear to have the potential to cause an Internet meltdown. Discovered by Robert Lee and Jack Louis from security vendor Outpost 24, the flaws allow a denial of service (DOS) attack that can be launched to cripple servers running various operating systems, as well as firewalls. Aside from the fact that very little bandwidth (and only a few seconds) is required for a successful attack, it is scary to think that affected systems could well remain disabled even after the cessation of an attack run. Taken together, it certainly is well within the realm of plausibility to take down an entire data center from a single terminal. Read more…