The main attack hit the roots at 5:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, and reached its maximum sustained traffic at 7 a.m. It started to subside around 10:30 that morning and was still going on -- though rather weakly -- at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

"If you take down the roots, you take down the Internet," says Petro. "By comparison, if you take down a company, that hurts them. But this is just an attack of a very different scale. When you see someone going after root, it's an attack directly at the infrastructure of the Internet."

It nearly took down 3 of the 13 root servers that help manage worldwide internet traffic.
Denial of service attacks -- sometimes called DoS -- are designed to pound each computer with countless questions that flood its ability to respond; effectively taking the machine down.

It was the fiercest attack on the 13 root servers since an October 2002 assault that took down many of the roots that help manage worldwide Internet traffic, according to Ben Petro, a senior vice president of NeuStar Inc. Three of the servers were nearly overloaded by the attack, but they did not go down, says Petro, who adds that they were in a slowed down brown out stage.

It's My Secret