cyber attack on Fed websites
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| Wed, 07-08-2009 - 12:01am |
Federal agency Web sites knocked out by massive, resilient cyber attack
Tuesday July 7, 2009, 11:41 pm EDT
(AP) -- A widespread and unusually resilient computer attack that began July 4 knocked out the Web sites of several government agencies, including some that are responsible for fighting cyber crime, The Associated Press has learned.
The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government. Some of the sites were still experiencing problems Tuesday evening. Cyber attacks on South Korea government and private sites also may be linked, officials there said.
U.S. officials refused to publicly discuss details of the cyber attack. But Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the agency's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a notice to federal departments and other partner organizations about the problems and "advised them of steps to take to help mitigate against such attacks."
The U.S., she said, sees attacks on its networks every day, and measures have been put in place to minimize the impact on federal Web sites.
It was not clear whether other federal government sites also were attacked.
Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
Web sites of major South Korean government agencies, banks and Internet sites also were paralyzed in a suspected cyber attack Tuesday. Ahn Jeong-eun, a spokeswoman at the Korea Information Security Agency, said the U.S. and South Korean attacks appeared to be linked.
The South Korean sites included the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, Korea Exchange Bank and top Internet portal Naver. They went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, Ahn said.
Kudwa had no comment on the South Korean attacks.
Two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their Internet service provider to resolve the problem.
Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, called it a "massive outage" and said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.
Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.
According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was "100 percent down" for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.
"This is very strange. You don't see this," he said. "Having something 100 percent down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event."
He added that, "The fact that it lasted for so long and that it was so significant in its ability to bring the site down says something about the site's ability to fend off (an attack) or about the severity of the attack."
Denial of service attacks against Web sites are not uncommon, and are usually caused when sites are deluged with Internet traffic so as to effectively take them off-line. Mounting such an attack can be relatively easy using widely available hacking programs, and they can be made far more serious if hackers infect and use thousands of computers tied together into "botnets."
For instance, last summer, in the weeks leading up to the war between Russia and Georgia, Georgian government and corporate Web sites began to see "denial of service" attacks. The Kremlin denied involvement, but a group of independent Western computer experts traced domain names and Web site registration data to conclude that the Russian security and military intelligence agencies were involved.
Documenting cyber attacks against government sites is difficult, and depends heavily on how agencies characterize an incident and how successful or damaging it is.
Government officials routinely say their computers are probed millions of times a day, with many of those being scans that don't trigger any problems. In a June report, the congressional Government Accountability Office said federal agencies reported more than 16,000 threats or incidents last year, roughly three times the amount in 2007. Most of those involved unauthorized access to the system, violations of computer use policies or investigations into potentially harmful incidents.
The Homeland Security Department, meanwhile, says there were 5,499 known breaches of U.S. government computers in 2008, up from 3,928 the previous year, and just 2,172 in 2006.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Federal-Web-sites-knocked-out-apf-2773092122.html?x=0&.v=3
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North Korea has been blamed for an attack on dozens of websites in South Korea, paralysing banks, government agencies and internet portals.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/southkorea/5778176/North-Korea-blamed-for-cyber-attack-on-South-Korea.html
South Korea's National Intelligence Service said it suspects the rogue state, or its sympathisers, may have orchestrated the attack, which used around 20,000 computers to overwhelm the websites with more traffic than they could handle.
South Korea's Foreign and Defence ministries, as well as the presidential office, all had their websites shut down for several hours. There was also speculation in the South Korean media that the attacks may have originated in China.
"The attacks appear to have been elaborately prepared and executed at the level of a group or a state. The sites hit included 14 United States sites including government ones," the NIS said in a statement to the news agency Yonhap.
However, no classified information was jeopardised during the attacks.
Hackers continued to attack some sites on Wednesday but South Korean internet service providers distributed a vaccine program to remove the viruses.
South Korea is one of the world's most wired countries with 95 per cent of homes having high-speed broadband access, according to a recent US survey.
Among the private Korean sites infiltrated were a newspaper and two major lenders, Shinhan Bank and Korea Exchange Bank, officials said.
The Defence Security Command reported last month that South Korea's military computer networks were under ever-growing cyber attack, with 95,000 cases reported daily on average.
Looks like a free for all.......
Wary of naked force, Israelis eye cyberwar on Iran
RAMAT HASHARON, Israel (Reuters) - In the late 1990s, a computer specialist from Israel's Shin Bet internal security service hacked into the mainframe of the Pi Glilot fuel depot north of Tel Aviv.
It was meant to be a routine test of safeguards at the strategic site. But it also tipped off the Israelis to the potential such hi-tech infiltrations offered for real sabotage.
"Once inside the Pi Glilot system, we suddenly realized that, aside from accessing secret data, we could also set off deliberate explosions, just by programing a re-route of the pipelines," said a veteran of the Shin Bet drill.
So began a cyberwarfare project which, a decade on, is seen by independent experts as the likely new vanguard of Israel's efforts to foil the nuclear ambitions of its arch-foe Iran.
More..... http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Iran/idUSTRE5663EC20090707
Al-Qaeda, China and Russia 'pose cyber war threat to Britain', warns Lord West
Al-Qaeda is intent on waging cyber-warfare against Britain and new defences will be built against such attacks from China and Russia, Lord West, the Security Minister, has said.
Even though it was arduous, remember, how much more secure everything seemed, when someone had to go to a file somewhere and get information off of actual paper? Or when your accounts were actually balanced by real people? Sometimes by real people right in your own branch of the bank/utility company...... When customer service people in India and China didn't have all your personal information, including social, date of birth and mothers maiden name??? When our government offices and federal security weren't in dailey peril of being breached by just about any tech savvy kid?
I know computers and the internet have "simplified" things but, sometimes, when you read things like these articles, I think, not so much.