Alliedassault - Microsoft comes up with Blaster Worm K.O.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11099

[quote:7f1f8]Microsoft develops cunning strategy to beat Blaster worm

Calls in Linux

By Paul Hales: Tuesday 19 August 2003, 09:14

HAVING BATTENED DOWN the hatches to fight off Blaster worm, Microsoft Friday decided to bite the bullet and do someting radical about it. There was only one thing left to do: call for Linux!
The software Monopolist, which has recognised the Open Source Linus as the greatest threat to it monopoly, took the successful step of changing its DNS so that requests for Microsoft.com were not resolved by its own network, running its own besieged software.

Rather, users' attempts to get to microsoft.com were switched to the Akamai's servers, which, as we noted before, runs Linux.

Akamai's global cacheing system speeds up Web performance by cacheing pages and delivering them to users on request. Microsoft usually uses this system, as do many companies large and small. But on Friday, under the pressure of the Blaster bug, the company changed its Domain Name System address for its own site to stop the bug attacking Windows Update pages. Instead it routed all its traffic through Akamai's Linix servers, getting a new IP address and producing the unusual chart over at net-watching site, Netcraft, here.

Netcraft spokesman Mike Prettejohn, says: "When we request http://www.microsoft.com, the DNS directs us to a server operated by Akamai. If you repeat this test, note that the actual Akamai server you connect to will differ according to your location on the Internet and may vary from request to request. Akamai’s http caching servers run Linux, and so we report Linux as the operating system."

"Akamai also forwards the http Server: header from the original server as part of the cached content, and so we report "Microsoft-IIS/6.0" as the web server," he adds. "We are seeing a quantity of mail asking why we are reporting http://www.microsoft.com running the "impossible" comination of the Linux operating system and Microsoft=IIS/6.0 web server."

Akamai's system can act as a defence against denial of service attacks, Pettejohn explains. Its DNS servers multiplex requests for a given hostname to the nearest point to each malicious machine, dividing the requests amongst servers and minimising the distance between attacker and target, to diminish its potency. As you note from our previous story here, the tactic proved quite a success.
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