A nice little piece by one of the inventors of the DNS system on ZD|Net news.
"The domain name system--the global directory that maps names to Internet protocol addresses--was designed to distribute authority, making organizations literally "masters of their own domain." But with this mastery comes the responsibility of contributing to the defense of the DNS. The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the DNS root servers on Oct. 21, 2002, should serve as a wake-up call. The attack was surprisingly successful--most of the root servers were disrupted by a well-known attack strategy that should have been easily defeated. Future attacks against all levels of the DNS--the root at the top; top-level domains like .com, .org and the country codes; and individual high-profile domains--are inevitable.
Quite a good read.