Sun Grid Targeted by DoS Attack

Not even hours out of the gate, Sun's public Grid service has already been hit by a denial of service attack. According to the company, its text-to-speech service became the target of attackers that caused the application to crash.

To stop the attack, Sun moved the application to the standard protected portion of the grid. The company said that users of the regular Grid noticed no degradation in service quality as a result of Wednesday's incident.

Those using the protected portion of the Grid do not have reason to worry, the company assures. That portion of the Grid will likely not be a target of any malicious activity due to the authorization process required to use it. Users must agree to legal and export terms, as well as share personal information.

Since Sun is taking payment through PayPal, the chances of spoofed addresses are slim. The online payment site requires information such as bank account and a verifiable address in order to send money.

Sun's insistence on knowing a lot about who is using its product should not come as a surprise, as its chief executive is no fan of anonymity. In a 2003 interview with CNET, Scott McNealy said that "absolute anonymity breeds irresponsibility." Authentication systems provide for a more "civil society," he argued.