"It suffers from being very complicated," Steven Gibson says, trying to explain why he thinks a little-known feature of some operating systems could spell doom for businesses on the Internet. Gibson runs Gibson Research, a highly regarded Laguna Hills, California, security research firm. The feature is something called "raw sockets," and it's in Windows XP, the newest version of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Internet businesses could find their access to the world buried in a flood of nonsense traffic that could exclude nearly everything else. Microsoft has yet to find a security hole it doesn't like, and Windows XP is no exception. In this case, the raw sockets feature can allow creators of denial of service (DoS) attacks untold levels of new power in their quest to bring the Internet to its knees. This is because the raw sockets feature makes it easy to command any computer running Windows XP to unleash a flood of packets that will more efficiently tie up the switches and routers upon which the Internet depends.
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