computer attacks

WASHINGTON – 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.




yahoo news

White House among targets of cyber attack
Other targets included NSA, Homeland Security and State Department

By Lolita C. Baldor

updated 2 hours, 49 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - A powerful Internet attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized: targets included the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange and other official Web sites in the most widespread cyber offensive of recent years.

Other targets of the attack included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post newspaper, according to an early analysis of the malicious software used in the attacks.

The cyber assault on the White House site had "absolutely no effect on the White House's day-to-day operations," said spokesman Nick Shapiro.

Preventative measures kept the WhiteHouse.gov site "stable and available to the general public," Shapiro said, but Internet visitors from Asia may have experienced problems.

Too early to know origins
South Korean intelligence officials believe the attacks were carried out by North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces, but many experts in cyber warfare said it was simply too early to know where the offensive orginated.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service, its principal spy agency, told South Korean lawmakers Wednesday it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers in the South were behind the attacks, according to an aide to one of the lawmakers briefed on the information.

The aide spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the information. The intelligence service said it could not immediately confirm the report, but it said it was cooperating with American authorities.

The attacks will be difficult to trace, said Professor Peter Sommer, an expert on cyberterrorism at the London School of Economics. "Even if you are right about the fact of being attacked, initial diagnoses are often wrong," he said Wednesday.

Treasury’s site knocked offline
Many of the U.S. government targets appeared to have blunted the sustained computer assaults successfully. Others, such as the U.S. Treasury Department, were knocked offline at times.

Two government officials acknowledged that Treasury's site was brought down, and said the agency had been working with its Internet service provider to resolve the problem. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

As of last night, Shapiro said, "all federal Web sites were back up and running." Shapiro said that the Department of Homeland Security "is aware of the DDOS attacks on federal and private sector public-facing Web sites."

Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service, said that the cyber attacks slowed down access to the agency's Web site, which operates on the same computer server as Treasury's site. Secret Service's site remained in operation despite the crippling effects of the cyber offensive, Donovan said.

"Our site was never knocked down, but it was slowed down at points," Donovan said. He added that Secret Service's "operational side" was not affected.

The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attacks. It was not immediately clear who might have been responsible or what their motives were.

Public Web sites targeted
The cyber attack did not appear, at least at the outset, to target internal or classified files or systems, but instead aimed at agencies' public Web sites, creating a nusiance both for officials and the Web consumers who use them.

The attacks appeared remarkably successful in limiting public access to victim Web sites, but internal e-mail systems are typically unaffected in such attacks.

Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the Federal Trade Commission site was down Sunday and Monday.

Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, California. 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.

Dale Meyerrose, former chief information officer for the U.S. intelligence community, said at least one of the federal agency Web sites became saturated with as many as a million hits per second per attack — amounting to 4 billion Internet hits at once. He would not identify the agency, but said the Web site generally is capable of handling a level of about 25,000 users at one time.

Meyerrose, who is now vice president at Harris Corp., said federal officials are divided on the whether a botnet was involved, but said the characteristics of the attack suggest the involvement of between 30,000 to 60,000 computers that participated in the assault.

While he said officials were investigating the incident, it appeared one attack occurred on July 4 that some agencies were able to contain, and then a second round came on July 7. Meyerrose said that since the attackers would have used surrogate computers, it is still too early to tell where it originated.

James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the fact that both the White House and Defense Department were attacked but did not go down points to the need for coordinated government network defenses.




"It says that they were ready and the other guys weren't ready," he said. "We are disorganized. In the event of an attack some places aren't going to be able to defend themselves."

Attacks on federal computer networks are common, ranging from nuisance hacking to more serious assaults, sometimes blamed on China. U.S. security officials also worry about cyber attacks from al-Qaida or other groups.

Web sites of major South Korean government agencies, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, and some banking sites were paralyzed Tuesday. An initial investigation found that many personal computers were infected with a virus ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korea Information Security Agency official Shin Hwa-su said.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31800532/ns/technology_and_science-security/wid/11915829?GT1=40000

North Korea blamed for ‘massive’ cyber attacks
Officials eye link after assault took down U.S., S. Korean government sites
msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 11:02 a.m. ET, Wed., July 8, 2009
SEOUL, South Korea - The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange.

An early analysis of the malicious software used in the attack found its targets also included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained attacks.

The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attack. The attack was remarkably successful. Some of the affected government Web sites — such as the Treasury Department, Federal Trade Commission and Secret Service — were still reporting problems days after it started during the July 4 holiday.

South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government Web sites, aides to two lawmakers said Wednesday.

The sites of 11 South Korean organizations, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, according to the state-run Korea Information Security Agency. Agency spokeswoman Ahn Jeong-eun said 11 U.S. sites suffered similar problems. She said the agency is investigating the case with police and prosecutors.

Denial of service attack
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 to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

"It certainly seems to be a well-organized attack," an anonymous government official told The Washington Post. "There are a lot of computers involved. What we don't know is who is orchestrating it."

The Korea Information Security Agency also attributed the attacks to denial of service.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, said he doubts whether the impoverished North has the capability to knock down the Web sites.

But Hong Hyun-ik, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank, said the attack could have been done by either North Korea or China, saying he "heard North Korea has been working hard to hack into" South Korean networks.

INTERACTIVE

Hack attack
Learn how a denial-of-service attack works.

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.

N. Korean sympathizers behind attacks?
On Wednesday, the National Intelligence Service told a group of South Korean lawmakers it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers "were behind" the attacks, according to an aide to one of lawmakers who was briefed on the information.

An aide to another lawmaker who was briefed also said the NIS suspects North Korea or its followers were responsible.

The aides spoke to The AP on condition of anonymity and refused to allow the names of the lawmakers they work for to be published, citing the classified nature of the information.

Both aides told The AP that the information was delivered in writing to lawmakers who serve on the National Assembly's intelligence committee.

The National Intelligence Service — South Korea's main spy agency — declined to confirm the information.

‘Massive outage’
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.


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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."

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said military intelligence officers were looking at the possibility that the attack may have been committed by North Korean hackers and pro-North Korea forces in South Korea. South Korea's Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the report.

According to The Washington Post, Joe Stewart, the director of malware research at Atlanta based SecureWorks, said the attack software contained few clues about its origins, although a line of text deep in within the malware carried the cryptic message "get/china/dns."

CONTINUED : Cyber warfare unit?
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31789294/ns/technology_and_science-security/wid/11915829?GT1=400006

uh oh, WE BEEN HAD!!!!!!
those cyber-attacks may have been propaganda B.S.
(bold and red are my additions)


"A determined propaganda blitz is well underway as
the government sets the stage for the passage of Cybersecurity Act of
2009, introduced in the Senate earlier this year. If passed, it will
allow Obama to shut down the internet and private networks. The
legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to
demand security data from private networks without regard to any
provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.
In other words, the bill allows the government to impose authoritarian
control over electronic communications.



Earlier today, the corporate media reported on a
“powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean
government agencies,” allegedly launched by North Korea. “South Korean
intelligence officials believe the attacks were carried out by North
Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces,” the Associated Press reported.



It should be noted that South Korea’s intelligence
apparatus — known as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency — was
formed under the auspices of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps
during the Korean War and is notorious for intervening in that
country’s politics and kidnapping Koreans living abroad and torturing
them. In other words, anything South Korean intelligence tells the
corporate media should be taken with a large grain of salt.



According to “security experts analyzing the
attacks,” Obama’s White House, the Pentagon, the New York Stock
Exchange, the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department,
State Department, the Treasury Department, Federal Trade Commission and
Secret Service, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post were
targeted.



All of this is happening as Senate Commerce Chairman
John (Jay) Rockefeller — who has said we’d all be better off if the
internet was never invented — plans a committee vote on cybersecurity
legislation he introduced in April with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.


http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14323

Great detective work Sky. I never thought of that twist. I believe you are probably right!

ahem..that was WH doing some great detective work

between this deception and the coins already being brought out and we all need vaccinated..yikes and yikes

sky otter wrote:

ahem..that was WH doing some great detective work

between this deception and the coins already being brought out and we all need vaccinated..yikes and yikes

AH my apologies. Good work WH!

thanks, mic/otter
i do it for you, ya know.......
you keep me going