Al-Jazeera Web Site Enduring Hack Attack

Gee Mr. Hegazi, maybe the reason why your traffic is four times what you expected is because your servers are experiencing a denial of service attack?

The newly launched English-language page, which went live Monday and posted images of the corpses of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, was hardest hit in a bombardment of data packets known as a denial-of-service attack.

Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at the Horizons Media and Information Services, the site’s Web host, said the attack began Tuesday morning local time.

Nabil Hegazi, assistant to the managing editor of the English Web site, denied that an attack was the reason the site was unavailable. He said it was difficult to access because traffic was almost four times more than expected.

For those of you who do not know what a DoS attack is, imagine the technological equivelant to a four year old tugging at her mother’s leg. Now complicate that image by having several thousand nagging four year olds demanding attention from the same mommy. . . that’s a denial of service attack. Hackers send packets (viruses that are essentially non-malignant to the host) to other computers on the web which at the hacker’s command simultaneously ping the al-Jazeera web server. It has a simple and devastating effect, and for very good hackers its nearly impossible to trace.