By Joel Hruska
October 02, 2008 - 05:45AM CT

DoS attacks have been around ever since the first caveman hacker decided to attack the first caveman network engineer's TCP/IP network. Much like sharks, DoS attacks have survived the passage of time by being very good at what they do, and while they've spawned offspring (distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS), the original version remains alive and well in the deep waters of the Internet.

A team of researchers—Robert E. Lee and Jack C. Louis—now claim to have found new vulnerabilities within the TCP/IP stack that can be exploited to allow for devastating DoS attacks, from simply crashing the device in question to snarling it so thoroughly it must be rebooted before it can function normally, even after an attack has been completed. The problem is, Lee and Louis aren't willing to say much more than that.

There's an extensive interview with the pair over at a site in the Netherlands with a name I could theoretically type, but you wouldn't remember, so I'll just hand over the URL (via Slashdot). The English section of the podcast starts around the five-minute mark, but some of you may enjoy the Dutch bits in front—I know I did. Throughout the course of the discussion, the two men detail how they stumbled on these TCP/IP vulnerabilities by accident some years ago, and what they've done since to document and explore the problem.

It's only fair, at this point, to note that Lee and Louis both come across as sober, professional individuals who are extremely knowledgable on the topics they discuss. Despite how the press may spin their statements, neither man recommends a Chicken Little type of reaction, and both speak out against such hysterical hijinks.