January 25th, 2003 
The Internet Crisis!
Hey guys, I'm sure a lot of you are wondering why the hell your sites are down, and if they aren't now, if this keeps up, they might just join the club!
Major backbones are being overwelmed by a worm in thousands and thousands of Microsoft SQL servers... what can this mean? Very simple.. with the worm, a group of people(or believed to be), have access to the commands these machines carry out.. well, they are being 'commanded' to 'DoS(Denial of Service)' the ENTIRE internet, on a UDP port of 1434 and 1413, this is causing a HUGE downtime in MANY data centers. My provider currently, who we have 3 servers with, WebReseller, has been unreachable for awhile now. A lot of people are aligning this with the threat to kill communications... well whether or not that's true, or it's some prank, this is causing a huge effect on the entire global network.
The fact that this is going on, really shows you how much we lack in security.. and of course, it's a Microsoft product that is responsible for this, but hey, what can you do?
Incase you don't know, Denial of Service, or DoS, means tons and tons of bad packets are being sent across the internet, and when a server gets these bad packets, it sends them back.. you're probably wondering what that does. Well, if it is a small amount, does nothing really, if you were to hit someone on a 10MBPS or a 100MBPS, then it's something. When you send thousands, millions, or in this case right now, billions of bad packets, the server sends them back. This requires the use of bandwidth to recieve and then send back.. which uses a ton of resources if they are being massly hit. So really, when this happens, networks are badly kept up, and your site will run poorly if you are a site on a server this happening on.
If you saw Tutorialforums down for a second, because of too many connections in the MySQL, it is because Rackshack, the provider of the server TF is hosted on, was being hit also. This is just ONE of the many effects this has on the internet and how you view it.
Personally, I hope this is resolved in the morning.. cause it is really hurting my work, please post your comments here if you have any, or if you have a question, please ask.
This was just filling some of you people who didn't know in, and giving you PROVEN facts at the moment, further developments that I am let in the know about, I of course will let you know. 
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