The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an alert Tuesday afternoon warning that the vulnerability could be used to "affect a large segment of the Internet community."
The exploit, identified by 36-year-old Milwaukee security researcher Paul Watson, could give hackers the ability to crash Internet routers -- the complex machines that direct most of the world's Web traffic.
The method that Watson identified takes advantage of an inherent design flaw in transmission control protocol (TCP) -- the language that all computers use to communicate on the Internet -- that could place ordinary computers at greater risk of attack.
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