SAN FRANCISCO — A hacker attack on the Internet failed this week - but experts warn there could be more to come. Three of the 13 computers that help direct all Internet traffic were hit with a flood of data requests Tuesday. Although it’s not yet clear where the torrent came from, it was most likely designed to overwhelm the computers, says Peter Reiher, a professor at UCLA’s engineering school. Hackers commonly use this approach, called a denial of service attack, to cause computers to slow down or crash. If the attack had been successful, Internet traffic might have slowed to a crawl. But the technical groups that quietly run the Internet behind the scenes have built a system designed to reroute traffic during an attack. It appeared to have worked, since few users noticed any slowdown, says Edward Naughton, a Boston-based lawyer at Holland & Knight who specializes in Internet issues. ‘It’s an indication that the system is well designed,’ he says. But that does not mean it is foolproof, says Avi Silberschatz, head of Yale’s computer science department. In a worst-case scenario, the attack may have been a small-scale assault designed to test […]