U.S. monitoring Internet attacks (fwd)

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Anyone have any specifics on this ? I haven't seen anything.

From the Aug 6 2002 Chicago Tribune --

http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/sns-internetattack.story

U.S. monitoring Internet attacks
By Ted Bridis

WASHINGTON -- The government was monitoring a series of electronic attacks
launched early today against U.S. Internet providers, hours after European
authorities passed warnings to the FBI predicting the attacks.

The impact from the attacks appeared limited, and there were no reports of
outages or even delayed e-mails.

A flood of data, spiking nearly 700 percent more than usual traffic, was
aimed at Internet providers and Web sites on the East coast starting about
2 a.m. EDT, then shifted toward providers and sites on the West coast,
said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But unlike some recent so-called "denial of service" attacks, which
employed hundreds or thousands of computers to overwhelm Web sites, this
latest attack appeared to be coming from a relatively small number of
machines, the official said. That has allowed Internet providers to
protect their networks more easily by filtering data from the attacking
computers.

The FBI issued a dramatic warning hours before the attacks started, based
on information from Italian authorities, the U.S. official said. The alert
cited "credible but non-specific information that wide-scale hacker
attacks" were planned against U.S. Web sites and Internet providers,
"possibly emanating from Western Europe."

The earliest attacks targeted East Coast companies, including some in
Virginia and Maryland, then shifted to target sites in Seattle, the
official said. The White House and FBI's National Infrastructure
Protection Center were monitoring the attacks.

Some experts indicated the attacks were so easily foiled that they did not
register any impact on the health of the Internet.

"We haven't seen anything out of the ordinary," said Chris Rouland of
Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems Inc., which sells protective
software to thousands of companies. "We're paying attention to any sites
that may go down."

Copyright 2002, The Associated Press

2

FUD from Washington. No, that never happens.

Or perhaps Victoria's Secret had another webcast. :wink:
End satire.

Best regards,

3

More FUD to beat the drums to let them impose their new order.

4

Any network ops from the major providers care to comment on what they're
seeing? Not seeing much discussion about this NIPC alert through overt or
back-channels, I'm tempted to place this in the FUDDY fear-mongering
category under Homeland Security Color Code Fuschia.

<SATIRE>

Let's think for a moment - there's not been much activity on the "cyber"
side of Homeland Hysteria -- er, Homeland Security -- as of late, so perhaps
they wanted to let the world know that "cyber" folks were still a part of
the game....?

I mean, this *is* the same entity - America's self-monikered cybercrime
agency - that announced the Melissa virus with this on their website:
http://www.infowarrior.org/articles/NIPC.jpg. It took them several hours to
revise the page, by which time we had already received detailed warnings,
signatures, and remediation guidance from any number of other sources. These
guys were the laughing stock of the security community.

</SATIRE>

If NIPC hascredible, specific information, they should release it. Otherwise
they should keep their mouths shut. Technology operations folks have enough
things to worry about during the day - from getting the latest Mickeysoft
patches deployed to resetting the bumbling executive's passwords to
uploading revised routes onto a Cisco on a longhaul backbone to support a
new customer -- they don't have time to be "extra vigilant" for shadowy
alerts of potential attack-type events that might happen tonight - but might
not - we're not really sure, but be on guard anyway.

(okay, maybe I wasn't quite done with satire yet.)

Memo to NIPC: Give us real, useful information, not this piecemeal drivel
that doesn't do anything but cover your tail -- if something happens, we all
know you can defend yourself and truthfully proclaim "we did post a warning"
- despite its questionable value to your intended audience.

This sort of game might be acceptable in the 'traditional' security and
intelligence community, but the private sector won't pay it much attention
when they have other, more pressing, more current problems that they ALREADY
KNOW ABOUT, security or otherwise.

Incidentially, state and local law enforcement feel the same way about the
repeated FBI terror alerts that essentially say "something might happen
sometime in the future, so stay on alert".....these local police entities
must contend with violent crime, drugs, gangs, and KNOWN problems affecting
their constituiencies and communities on a daily basis -- they'll give more
attention to those day-to-day hometown issues than vague alerts of potential
gloom and doom in the potential future based on potentially unconfirmed
information.

</RANT>

Bah. In the interests of bandwidth conservation on the list, comments
welcomed off-line. I need more coffee....

rick
infowarrior.org

5

Its from the Department of Police-State dis-information...or DPSD
They forget we're not the usual sheeple that will swallow their crap unquestioningly...

6

Well don't forget, its a fine line between home land and father land:)