Researchers have released an attack tool that makes it trivial for anyone to take down websites that allow users to connect via secure connections. Unlike most denial-of-service attacks (DoS) that require an attacker to direct a network of distributed computers to take down a website by flooding it with fake traffic, the so-called THC-SSL-DOS tool purportedly allows an attacker to achieve the same result from a single computer – or in the case of a website with a number of webservers, just a handful of computers would be sufficient. The tool, released by a group called The Hackers Choice, exploits a known ...