Re: [ILUG-BOM] [OT]Code Red and Microsoft

Sometime on Aug 6, Manish Jethani assembled some asciibets to say:

weeks ago was that the White House website, the
ultimate target of its initial attacks, had to
change its IP address.  [snip]

Shouldn't the IP be looked up from DNS during an attack? Why not attack www.whitehouse.gov instead of a hard-coded IP address? Are lookups too expensive for a DoS attack?

If you really want the attack to work, then yes. If your intent instead is to show that pseudo random number generators, when started with a well chosen seed at different times will all converge onto a single value, then it's the beauty of the mathematics that comes into play. DNS lookups would be plain cheating, and ugly. This wasn't plain math though, more of brute force.

P