Wired News: Hackers Attack Key Net Traffic Computers

Did you notice that the Internet was down? No, me neither. But apparently there was a massive attack on the UltraDNS servers that serve the .org domain Web sites.

RipeNCC has a graph which shows the attack, and Wired News has more on the story.

The Daily WTF: The Intentional Slowdown

We often find that poorly coded applications that work on the LAN often do not work when moved to the WAN because the latency is much lower and bandwidth much greater in a gigabit network then when sending data over a WAN link.

Apparently, however, that’s not the only cause for hard to diagnose slowdowns caused by poor coding.

N. L.’s role on the project was to make a configurable Thread.Sleep() that could intentionally slow down execution of the ExecCommand method. This feature could not do any logging, nor could it appear in the documentation anywhere. Rule #1 of intentional slowdown: you do not talk about intentional slowdown. Rule #2 of intentional slowdown: you do not talk about intentional slowdown! Why did this feature even exist? Well, database-specific extensions are inherently risky, so they wanted the application to have some room to breathe.

It’s more of a story about how some poor design decisions led to absurdity, but if anyone tells you that absurdity doesn’t exist in IT, we had an international panic over the fact that programmers used only two numbers to store dates…

Security.itworld.com (via Techworld): Study notes link between IT sabotage, work behavior.

The research suggests that potential troublemakers should be easy to spot. Nearly all the cases of cybercrime investigated were carried out by people who were "disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly."

According to the research, 86 percent of those who committed cybercrimes held technical positions and 90 percent had system administrator or privileged system access. Almost half -- 41 percent -- of those who sabotaged IT systems were employed at the time they did it but most crimes were committed by insiders following termination.

Additionally, the study found that employees who show up on time, get the job done, are congenial with the staff, had a clean bill of mental health, and generally perform well, limit their crimes to stealing pens from the office supply desk.