DATELINE–San Jose, Calif.

Government, private sector confront massive structural damage

Debbie Ranscom was accustomed to receiving less than a dozen e-mail orders daily for her line of cross-stitched pillow shams. But between 2 and 4am on Monday morning, Ranscom received over 1,200 orders, complete with mailing addresses and detailed credit card information.

Ranscom, who works out of her college-aged daughter’s former bedroom in Livermore, Calif., was ecstatic. “At first I was thrilled at the numbers,” recalls Ranscom, “but then I started thinking about how I could possibly sew all those patterns.”

But when the entrepreneur began sorting through her growing pile of electronic orders she discovered that in fact they were meant for another destination, VeritoBill, an online credit verification service.

By 6:20am Monday morning, Network Solutions, the company responsible for assigning and maintaining Internet domain names, announced that it had experienced a “brief database failure resulting in corrupt .COM and .ORG zone files.” The malfunction reassigned Internet addresses to over 14,000 domains, including a host of Internet Service Providers and online financial services as well as smaller sites such as Ranscom’s pillowaccents.com.

“It’s as if there was an earthquake on the Internet,” explains Stefan Heiss, a systems administrator at one of UUNet’s network operations centers, “companies built on electronic exchanges suddenly lost their footing and a lot of things got tossed around every which way.” Heiss, who manages network traffic on one of the Internet’s major backbones, was one of the first technicians to report the faulty domain name server addressing instructions.

As a result of the minor error within Network Solutions’ root server database, e-mail messages addressed to one domain were received by another, with no way of tracking who received what message. Although many of the redirected e-mails were simply bounced back, tens of thousands were accepted at the wrong destination.

Web sites were also thrown out of balance as hundreds of thousands of requests for Web content were incorrectly rerouted to seemingly random domains. For example, a person wishing to read the front page of the Union Israelita de Caracas (www.uic.org) was instead referred to the home page of the online book “Deros: A year in Vietnam” (www.deros.com). Similar mixups affected well-known commercial sites like Salon magazine and Gateway’s virtual warehouse.

Analysts at MediaMetrix, an online traffic analysis firm, estimate Monday’s domain snafu will cost companies upwards of $40 million in revenue. The final amount may double when damages unreported thus far are finally tallied. Although there is no reliable means for calculating personal losses incurred as a result of the database malfunction, at least a half million users were left suddenly bereft of their own e-mails or flooded with someone else’s.

Max Hannon who moderates an electronic mailing list devoted to rare and valuable cameras guesses he missed at least 30 messages during the “dataquake.” In their place, Hannon received 127 pornographic messages addressed to max@pleasurecenter.com. The 63 year-old retired pharmacist remains upbeat despite having his confidence shaken. “I don’t suppose I have any real use for these messages but they’re quite fun.”

However, not everyone is taking the Internet earthquake in stride. Dave Fercer, a risk management specialist with the London Agency, suggests that Monday’s dramatic shifting of DNS zone files merely casts into sharp relief the fault lines upon which the Internet currently rests. Fercer expects insurance companies will now be pressured to develop policies specially tailored to the needs of the online world.

“This was a small event,” cautions Fercer, “but what happens when the Big One hits?”