A new wave of devastating Internet attacks is just waiting to happen and there is there is currently little chance of preventing it.
The threat is a variation of the “denial of service” (DoS) attack, commonly used by malicious hackers to block a website by bombarding it with spurious requests. However, the new threat would target routers, key hubs of the Internet’s infrastructure, instead of individual websites.

“We believe this to be an imminent and real threat with a potentially high impact,” says the new report, Trends in Denial of Service Attack Technology, published by the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University.