![]() “He’s clever, and he’s been trying everything,” Claiborne said. She spent the night examining the requests one by one as they scrolled by-interrogating each zombie, trying to find a key to the attacker’s strategy. The assailant then disguised his zombies as legitimate Web users, fooling the filters so well that Claiborne refused to tell me how it was done, for fear that others would adopt the same tactic. The first wave of the attack was easily filtered by Prolexic’s automated system. The result was akin to what occurs when callers jam the phone lines during a television contest: with so many computers trying to connect, almost none could get through, and the company was losing business. ![]() ![]() Although few, if any, of those computers’ owners knew it, their machines had been hijacked by hackers they had become what programmers call “zombies,” and had been set loose on MensNiche. MensNiche’s problems had begun a week earlier, with a flood of fake data requests-what is known as a distributed denial-of-service attack-from computers around the world. “Hence,” she said, “I look like hell today.” The MensNiche attacker had launched an assault on the company’s Web site at 4 a.m., and Claiborne had spent the night in the office fending it off. Anna Claiborne, one of the company’s senior network engineers, wandered into the noc in jeans and a T-shirt. The engineers, gathered in the company’s network operations center, or noc, on the fourth floor of a new office building, were monitoring Internet traffic on fifty-inch wall-mounted screens. One afternoon this spring, a half-dozen young computer engineers sat in the headquarters of Prolexic, an Internet-security company in Hollywood, Florida, puzzling over an attack on one of the company’s clients, a penileenhancement business called. ![]()
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