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Internet traffic cops could foil website hacker attacks

By Paul Marks and Barry Fox

22 March 2003

A COMMON trick among hackers is to flood a website with endless “packets” of junk data, forcing it to shut down. Now microchip maker Intel says it has come up with a way to automatically thwart these attacks.

In a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, hackers exploit one of the Internet’s weak points: its ability to route messages around damaged parts of the network. So if a message is blocked in one direction, it will try another way in.

First the hackers plant malicious, virus-like programs called Trojans inside a large number of networked computers, often those in large…

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