Using leap seconds as a Denial of Service attack
In light of the recent discovery of the Leap second bug in Linux some NTP Servers seemed to announce a wrong leap second. This is a rather cool and intriguing way to attack a large quantity of Servers and trying to cause a Denial of Service or increase the power bill.
As not all all systems received the latest patches (the next leap second wasn’t announced yet, so no need to rush…) there are still vulnerable systems around and some probably were affected.
See http://serverfault.com/questions/403732/anyone-else-experiencing-high-rates-of-linux-server-crashes-during-a-leap-second for more details about the problems associated with the leap second bug and how to mitigate and fix the problems.
