Impending CNN.Com DDoS?
by Jose NazarioOver at the Dark Visitor blog, in a post entitled Upcoming Chinese hacker attack on CNN building steam, Heike shows that Chinese hackers are planning to target the US news outlet CNN with a coordinated DDoS attack. So far I haven’t seen any specific botnets targeting CNN’s website, but someone always wants to start early, which may indicate if these attacks will materialize. Looking at our data, I see evidence of a few dozen DDoS attacks against one of the CNN website IPs in the past day. Here’s a quick breakdown of what ATLAS has measured:
Destinations |
www.cnn.com (one of the IPs for this DNS name) |
Attacks in past 24 hours |
36 attacks measured |
Attacks by type |
36 TCP SYN floods |
Average and max attack duration |
330 seconds average (5.5 minutes), 337 second maximum (slightly longer) |
These attacks were very small, they barely registered, so it’s hard to say that they’re the massive onslaught that we may see this weekend. It’s possible this is entirely unrelated – a lot of hackers try to bring down major websites like this every day.
We’re watching our attack monitors to see if we see evidence of these attacks and will keep our blog updated if and when we see these attacks.

[...] themselves. (Google translated page), appear to be waffling, and Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks reports there has been little pre-attack activity within the last 24 [...]