Hackers Take a Whack at the Sun Grid Utility

Published: March 30, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As we reported in last week's issue, Sun Microsystems has finally turned on the lights for the public version of the Sun Grid Compute Utility, allowing anyone with a credit card to come into a Web portal, sign up to buy computing capacity using a PayPal account. Hackers, as you might have expected, could not resist the temptation to try to screw the day up for Sun.

So they launched a distributed denial of service attack against the Web portal that front ends the Compute Utility. Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing, confirmed that the attacks happened. "There were some minimal DOS attempts early the first day, which is normal for any Internet service. The problem was resolved quickly, she explained. "The Sun Grid was not compromised and there was no degradation of service for users inside the Sun Grid."

Up until now, a text-to-speech demo application was available to anyone coming to the Sun Grid splash page, which is what the hackers attacked. By keeping this page busy, hackers could degrade the performance of the front end for the Compute Utility. Now, Sun has brought the text-to-speech utility inside the Web portal, so hackers can't just hammer this application and then cause the other Sun Grid applications to be inaccessible from the Web.