Black Hats throw punch at F-Secure

Malicious attackers, a.k.a Black Hats, have thrown a punch at F-Secure, slightly grazing the Finland-based software security vendor but failing to knock it out.

F-Secure on Wednesday posted a notice on its site that it had been a victim of a denial service attack. The DOS attackers managed to slow down the company's external Web site for several hours, but failed to shut it down.

"We've had DOS attacks launched against before, but this was the largest attack to date," said Ari Hypponen, F-Secure chief technology officer. "Clearly, this was the result of the attackers using a botnet."

Damn those botnets. This tool of malicious attackers bring to bear an army of thousands of commandeered computers turned into zombie machines, which, unbeknownst to the owners of these PCs, are able to remotely launch worms, phishing campaigns and other de' jour virus onto unsuspecting victims.

The DOS attack on F-Secure's Web site began shortly before noon Wednesday, and continued for several hours in several waves, Hypponen said. But F-Secure was able to fight back using several counter-measures to turn those waves into ripples, which subsided before dinner time.

"We felt we should let our customers know about the incident, since it slowed down our servers for about three hours," Hypponen said. "None of our systems, or customers were affected."