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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0254 New Airline's Ticket Sales Launch Disrupted by DoS attack:

A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack targeting the web site of Virgin Atlantic, a new low-cost carrier scheduled to start service soon, disrupted ticket sales on 19 July. A company spokesman described the incident as a "SYN cyber attack", probably referring to a SYN Flood DoS attack in which computers are directed to issue SYN requests to open communication with a target system, but then do not acknowledge that the connections have been established. The attack works if the targeted system allocates all of its resources after receiving the SYN requests, but before it has received the acknowledgements, preventing legitimate connections from being established. After the company's web site became unavailable, its phone lines became jammed by people who could not access the site.

(Washington Post, 20Jul07)

Last Modified: Tuesday, 31-Jul-2007 22:50:08 EDT