There's more than a little irony in the fact that yesterday - when the world marked Safer Internet Day - hackers were attempting to knock over the root servers that form the backbone of the internet.
A handful of the 13 machines that work as the internet's traffic cops were struck last night as Asian hackers overwhelmed them in a co-ordinated strike. According to our report, the attacks lasted 12 hours but failed to completely immobilise the servers in question.
Although the assault lasting several hours was the largest in the past five years, it had little effect on internet users.
"It was a significant and concerted attack, but the average internet user would have barely noticed," said Paul Levins, the vice-president of corporate affairs at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the body that oversees the running of the root servers and the net's addressing system.
Two servers seemed to be the target of yesterday's attack, one operated by the US defence department and the other by Icann. The US homeland security department confirmed it was monitoring what it called "anomalous" internet traffic.
Using botnets and zombie machines, the hackers tried to overwhelm the root servers in what was effectively a massive denial-of-service strike. But security experts say ordinary internet users wouldn't have noticed any real difference, despite the fact that Graham Cluley of Sophos likened the attack to '"twenty hippos trying to get through a revolving door at the same time".
The question, however, must be a wider one about security - and the possibility of further threats. If they had enough to impinge on the root servers in this way, who's to say they aren't going to try again?
