Cyber-Attacks?

Galahad2 writes "The Washington Post has a lengthy article about the Bush administration's fears of an Al Qaeda cyber attack on the nation's infrastructure. Though we have all seen this sort of attack as a possiblity for a long time, I'm having a hard time believing that Al Qaeda is capable of anything along these lines." You're not the only one. The article does cite an example of the only known infrastructure attack, a case in Australia where a consultant used his inside knowledge of a local sewage treatment system to dump raw sewage, hoping for a contract to solve the problem he created.

Comments

Rise in UNIX Targetted Attacks

[Nishi-no-wan]

Off topic, I know, but there's been a serious increase in attempts to hijack my web site since the Gobbles' proof of break-in-ability code for the Apache hole was released last week. It's probably the work of out of school script kiddies rather than that cad Al, but I'd like to know if other sys-admins have notice an increase in UNIX targetted attacks (specifically geared toward Apache) in the past week.

The usual attack pattern goes:

1. Enter the site on a "powered by freebsd" google search reference
2. Cause an error ("GET ../.." or a "GET / HTTP/1.0" request) to get the web server name and version.
3. If the version is a vulnerable version of Apache, an attack commenses with a different tool.

If everyone hasn't upgraded Apache to a safe version yet, I strongly suggest you do. It's not just a Microsoft hole any more.