Walaika K. Haskins, newsfactor.com writes:

There is a new kind of denial-of-service (DoS) attack hitting the Internet these days, and it has VeriSign and others responsible for handling the Internet's infrastructure very worried.

The unusually powerful attacks strike at the basic structure of the Net, exploiting the computers that manage online traffic and using them to overwhelm Web sites. The effects are similar to more traditional DoS attacks, but the newer technique by hackers is far more potent because it launches using fewer hacked computers and the ensuing attack is easily amplified to be far more overwhelming.

The new form of attacks emerged at the end of December 2005 and accelerated in January before settling down about mid-February, said VeriSign Chief Security Officer Ken Silva.

He said some 1,500 separate Internet domains have been attacked using the new method. Comparing the attacks to those in October 2002 when nine of the 13 computer "root" servers used to manage all Internet traffic were the object of a massive attack, Silva said that the new attacks were "significantly larger than what we saw in 2002, by an order of magnitude."

Read the complete article on VeriSign Warns of Massive Net Attacks