Risk: High
In recent articles we addressed the 'distributed attack networks' such as TFN and Trinoo that allow widespread co-ordinated attacks. Now Yahoo have admitted that their systems were taken out of service for several hours under such an attack.
Yahoo run one of the most hardened of the major high-volume web sites, with an up-time of over 99.3 percent, a tribute to their security and also their resilience and reliability infrastructure, so it is a sign of the power of the new attacks. The attack was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, no breach was made into Yahoo's systems, but nevertheless Yahoo is reported to have lost several hundred thousand dollars in 'page hits' advertising revenue due to the outages.
References
NY Times article
USA Today article
NTA Monitor white paper on the DDoS problems