In fact, the author of the MyDoom virus has delegated control of the most enormous volume of http traffic that the Internet has yet seen to hostmaster@sco.com. On a whim, SCO can direct that Tsunami at an object of their choosing, simply by changing an A record in named.conf in time for the change to propagate by Sunday.

In this context, SCO Executives may have latitude to consider alternative defenses which do not involve having to parlay with low-down-no-good-Linux-loving-CDN-providers.

My husband was called on Wednesday by "VISA" and I was called on Thursday by "MasterCard". It worked like this:

Person calling says, "This is Carl Patterson (any name) and I'm calling from the Security and Fraud department at VISA. My Badge number is 12460. Your card has been flagged for an unusual purchase pattern, and I'm calling to verify. This would be on your VISA card. Did you purchase an Anti-Telemarketing Device / any expensive item for £497.99 from a marketing company based in 'Anywhere'?"

Content distribution networks (CDN) can play a key role in defeating DDoS attacks, using their large and widely distributed networks of servers to blunt their impact. Microsoft used a CDN service from Akamai to keep its web site online last August, when the Blaster worm programmed machines to launch a DDoS on the Windows Update site. Microsoft's strategy drew considerable attention, as the front page of the www.microsoft.com site was served by Linux machines on Akamai's network.

The largest CDN providers - Akamai, Cable & Wireless and Speedera - all make extensive use of Linux servers. That's a problem for SCO, which contends that Linux includes copyrighted code from its own operating system, and is asking Linux users to pay $699 per server for the right to use its intellectual property. It’s implausible that any of the CDN providers would pay this licence fee. If SCO feels that it is unable to patronise a very prominent Linux user, this eliminates one of the most proven defences and contrasts strongly with Microsoft’s practical and prosaic approach.

The merger will more than double Via Net.Works' European hosting customers. Amen hosts 111K hostnames, with growth of 104 percent in 2003, while Via Net.Works hosts about 81K hostnames. The purchase of Paris-based Amen adds a "cash generating pre-paid business model" that will immediately boost the company's earnings.

The variant, dubbed MyDoom.b, is being circulated by computers infected with the original MyDoom, according to Kaspersky. The new version is identical to MyDoom, but includes www.microsoft.com in the targets of its DDoS component, along with www.sco.com. Both attacks are programmed to begin Feb. 1 and continue through Feb. 12.

The trend over the second half of 2003 and to date is as follows:

A dynamically updating graph is available here.

A dynamically updating graph is available here.

The virus, also known W32.Novarg.A@mm or WORM_MIMAIL.R, masquerades as a returned e-mail and attempts to disguise an attachment as a text file, similar to ones that often accompany errant e-mails.

Cable & Wireless' money-losing hosting operation remains among the largest in the world, with more than 767K hostnames and 250K active sites. Its 1,000-plus hosting customers include General Electric, Starbucks, Reebok, Office Max, CBS Sportsline and Slashdot.

1&1, Europe's largest hosting company with more than 3.5 million hostnames, said it had already signed up more than 100,000 accounts through a pre-launch promotion offering free hosting for three years. The offer sought to raise 1&1's profile in America and quickly gain a critical mass of customers.

"1&1 sets new standards on the US Web hosting market with a domain price as low as $5.88 a year and $49 a month for a dedicated server," said Andreas Gauger, chief executive officer for 1&1 Internet.

The domain offer shaves 11 cents off 1&1's previous .com registration price, already the lowest among major hosting providers. At $49 a month, 1&1's dedicated server offering matches the recent launch pricing of Server4You, the American arm of another expansion-minded German host, Intergenia AG. 1&1 also is offering template-driven e-commerce sites for small businesses at monthly rates between $9.99 and $49.99.

In 2003 1&1 Internet AG gained over 800K hostnames, a 30% increase over the year, to become the largest hoster worldwide with over 3.5M hostnames in December 2003. The Netcraft Hosting Provider Switching Analysis showed the US operation to gain over 9K hostnames in December 2003, with largest gains from GoDaddy, EV1Servers and eNom.

It was a banner year for hosting companies based in Germany, home to the fastest-growing host and three of the top six in hostname growth. Leading the pace was IP Exchange GmbH, which lived up to its motto ("where the server lives") with 352 percent growth in hostnames on the year.

The top American performers demonstrated that there were successful growth strategies in virtually every market niche, including colocation (Hurricane Electric), dedicated servers (EV1Servers), shared hosting (iPowerWeb), small business e-commerce hosting (Yahoo!) and domain registration and hosting (Go Daddy).

In a court filing just hours before the bid deadline, XO said it learned Tuesday that Gores had hired away the XO executive directing a planned joint bid with One Equity Partners, a unit of Bank One Corp. Gores said the motion was "nothing more than thinly-veiled attempt to disrupt the bidding process," and amounted to gamesmanship by XO chairman Carl Icahn.

Qwest wants more time to evaluate customer contracts, saying delays in gaining access to documents have left it at a disadvantage to Gores and other suitors. Koch Data Centers LLC made a similar filing, also seeking an extension until Tuesday.

In the context of that the performance of the leading hosting company sites monitored by Netcraft seems quite respectable; only three hosting company sites amassed as much as a day’s downtime during the period, while at the other end of the spectrum, five providers went through the entire six month with no outages at all.

From customers’ point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on the hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage. Seven hosting companies went through the period with less than 0.01% of requests failing from our five measurement points.

Seven of the top nine sites run on FreeBSD. The exceptions are Datapipe, which is doing a fine job of promoting the reliability of Windows 2003, and German hosting company komplex.net which runs on Linux.

August, the mother of all months, which contained Blaster, Sobig and the North East US power outage, effectively decided several of places in the top 10. Five of the 2003 top 10- AboveNet, Datapipe, iPowerWeb, Yahoo, and Tierranet had no outages at all during August, whereas a thirteen hour power outage put paid to New York Internet, which otherwise sat in the top 10 most of the year.

Four owner managed hosting companies will take considerable pride that Yahoo, with its colossal financial resources and economies of scale, did not come top, with INetU edging out Datapipe, IPowerWeb, and Pair Networks by virtue of an extremely reliable Q4, and faultless December.

Viewing the source code of the e-mail link will usually reveal the hoax, showing the target URL is unrelated to the bank. In this case, the e-mail link is encoded with hexadecimal numbers, with each encoded character beginning with "%". Thus, the source code looks like:

http://ibank.barclays.co.uk%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01@%77%77%77%2E%6E%65%77%79%65%72
%73%6D%2E%63%6F%6D:%38%30/%31%2C%2C%6C%6F%67%6F%6E%2C%30%30%2E
%70%68%70

http://www.newyersm.com:80/1,,logon,00.php

Go Daddy, the current volume leader among registrars, recently returned to $8.95 after briefly lowering its prices to $7.95 in an apparent response to price cuts by EV1Servers and Hostway. Last month EV1Servers hiked its domain pricing from $5 per year to $6.49, which equals the lowest reseller rate available from its wholesale provider, OpenSRS.

But others are willing to sell domains below cost as a marketing strategy. The newest is MyValueHost, a new business unit of HostMysite.com, which has begun selling domain names for $4 a year.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group identified more than 90 unique email fraud and phishing attacks in November and December, as scammers sought to capitalize on the increased online shopping activity during the holiday season. Numerous campaigns employed a widely publicised bug in Internet Explorer that allows fraudsters to construct more convincing urls.

During December both the INetU and Cable & Wireless sites were faultless with no failed requests at all from any of our five measurement points.

INetU's site has been consistently highly ranked throughout Q4 2003, and has now been in the top three for the last three months running. As neither INetU or Cable and Wireless had any failed requests, INetU is ranked above Cable & Wireless because the average connection time from our performance measurment points to the INetU site was faster.

Cable and Wireless, located in Swindon is the hosting company site that is geographically closest to Netcraft, but it does not enjoy any special advantage because of this; there is only one performance collection point in the UK, which is in London.

Sites running on BSD operating systems occupied four out of the first seven places.

In the January 2004 survey we received responses from 46,067,743 sites.