Root Servers Attacked

It seems that this article is engaging in a little scare tactics to get people to read it. It says that a D0S attack "cripples" Internet root servers however this is what the article says:

Three of the servers were nearly overloaded by the attack, but they did
not go down, says Petro, who adds that they were in a slowed down brown out
stage.

A slowed down brown out stage is not "crippled." If they actually went down then I would say that they had be crippled. They should have put the word "nearly" in there to show what actually happened. In any case this is what would worry me about this story:

Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute and
chief technology officer for the Internet Storm Center, says more investigation
will have to be done before analysts can figure out where the attacks were
coming from. The Internet Storm Center is a cooperative cyber threat monitoring
and alert system.

If the attack was a little stronger it might have crashed the Internet and then all hell would have broken loose. What is worse is they would not even know where the attack came from. I think they need to develop stronger tracking tools to catch these DoSers before they cause billions of dollars in damages.