Cyberspace 9/11 is here, by Kirby Sommers

Cyberspace 9/11 is here. A trojan worm similar to the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 are causing havoc to companies such as Time Warner Cable, Register.com and UltraDNS owned by Neustar and to millions of their customers throughout the United States and Europe.

Time Warner Cable’s director of digital communications said it’s DNS servers have been targeted by “denial of service” attacks for seven days commencing on February 19. DNS servers matches easy to remember web addresses to corresponding numbers and without these translations working, web browsers are unable to find their destinations.

UltraDNS the Reston, VA company had serious DOS attacks on April 2 and acknowledged in a statement that same day: “Early this morning, our monitoring systems detected a significant denial of service attack, which affected a small subset of our customers, in some cases for as long as a few hours.” Customers affected included Amazon.com, Oracle.com, Juniper.com Diamond.com, Salesforce.com, Advertising.com and Petco.com.

Anyone trying to reach those websites and others impacted by this attack received error notices like “page cannot be displayed”.

Although both Time Warner Cable and UltraDNS claim to have the problem under control, Register.com is in its third day with no end in sight. Larry Kutscher, CEO of Register.com said: “unnamed persons all over the world are trying to attack us. Every time we get it under control, it morphs into another attack. It’s morphed at least three to four times. It keeps changing direction.”

Steven Weiss, the CTO of the Carlton Group in New York City insists we’re under federal attack. “We have no way to stop it. Why is no news organization documenting this? Where is the Federal CTO? Where is he? Where is Homeland security? This is a serious problem. I don’t feel comfortable. We’re under attack and no one is doing anything. Just like the beginning of the banking problems. It was swept under the rug for a long time. They’re going to keep it quiet until they’re pushed against the wall.”

Valerie Harding of Ripple Effect Communications a public relations firm whose offices are in Boston and who is a Register.com customer exclaimed: “For a PR firm we don’t even have a website. Some of our large clients are big public companies. We just lost a client who was supposed to have paid us a $74,000 retainer. And that’s just for one year. We lost that money because of what’s happening with Register.com. Losses are going to be huge.”

And, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my own businesses are also in big trouble as a result of Register.com’s problems. Both KirbySommers.com where I offer renters in New York City landlord data in order to save them broker fees and MovieStub.net where I save movie goers money by selling discount movie tickets are both casualties of this killer attack. My credibility as a businesswoman has been put on the line because no one has been able to access my websites for three days. I can’t even get into my mail.

I brought up the financial loses I incurred with Kutscher who replied by stating: “My main focus is on getting back up.” For a company that prides itself on being the first online service business to receive the J.D. Power & Associates Call Service Certification, I’d say Mr. Kutscher’s response lacked service satisfaction.

Where are you FBI, CIA, FEMA and our newly elected DC Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra…can you hear me? We’re under attack and no one is minding the store. No one is doing anything about the internet Armageddon which has cost businesses billions of dollars. Can you hear me now or have you gotten an error message?

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Kirby Sommers

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Kirby Sommers

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