Key Internet Servers Attacked for 5 Hours

Hackers hobbled two of the Internet’s 13 key, or root, servers for five hours by flooding them with useless information, a U.S. security company reports.

Beginning Tuesday morning about 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, the servers at the U.S. Department of Defense and Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers were inundated, which slowed Internet traffic, but did not stop it, the International Data Goup reported from Framingham, Mass.

Ben Petro, senior vice president of services with Internet service provider Neustar Inc., said the attack appeared to have been launched by a group of infected personal computers working in what’s called a botnet.

After about five hours, Internet service providers were able to filter most of the clutter from the botnet machines and data traffic to and from the root servers was mostly back to normal, the report said.

Petro said engineers have no idea what the motivation was for the attack.