Vendors scramble to fix bug that could crash Internet systems

The security community is abuzz about critical vulnerabilities discovered in the TCP/IP protocol that underly the Internet. This comes on the heels of a blog posting by security researcher Robert Hansen in which he outlines some dire consequences of these flaws. Technical details have not been released to the public at this point, though the experts who discovered the problem--Robert Lee and Jack Louis from security vendor Outpost 2--say that they were able to knock-out Windows, Linux, embedded systems and even firewalls. Indeed, targeted machines could remain disabled even after the cessation of the denial of service (DOS) attack. As a result, even taking out an entire data center is a plausibility, given that the issue allows a system to mount a successful DOS attack with very little bandwidth.

For more on this issue:
- check out this article from PC World