Corrections to USA Today article

• The first reports of trinoo attacks came in late June/early July in Europe, not in August. The University of Washington did not see attacks until August.

• Denial of service attacks can be aimed at any system, not just Web servers. They do not involve "requests" as much as just overloading the system with network packets.

• The attack tools themselves do nothing to "commandeer large numbers of computers." They are effective and usable because intruders are able to commandeer large numbers of computers in the first place, on which they then install the distributed tools to use to attack. Prevent the attackers from root compromising 3000 systems on the Internet and they can't use 3000 systems for a distributed attack.