Slashdot Mirror
Online Attack Hits US Government Web Sites
angry tapir writes "A botnet composed of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against US government Web sites and causing headaches for businesses in the US and South Korea. The attack started Saturday, and security experts have credited it with knocking the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) web site offline for parts of Monday and Tuesday. Several other government Web sites have also been targeted, including the Department of Transportation."
ok let's blame China now for this.
Let's not. See what offends me about this whole thing is that it's so obivious. If they'd just targeted America, it could have been anyone. But 'whoever' it was had to go and hit South Korea too, at the same time. Who hates both the US and South Korea?
By the way, don't say "Chinese Plot", they have nothing to gain from upping tensions at this point. They've been trying to bring the North Koreans into negotiations and they too have issued denounciations against NK by this point. Iran's official line is that the UK is mostly responsible for their problems, they have little to gain from doing something to the Americans and the Russians were just recently in negotiations with Obama that appear to have gone well.
How do you kill that which has no life?
No. They are suspecting North Korea
hilarious
The reason the U.S. wouldn't attack North Korea in a cyber war is the same reason we wouldn't attack Iran. The internet is a far more powerful tool when it is use to sway opinion than it is to cripple systems.
Do you seriously think that North Korea has any significant systems exposed on public networks?
You could probably deface their Wikipedia entry, though. Go hog wild.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
What always bugs me with these "cyberwar" news is that people try to put one country as responsible for them, and its always China or Russia or one of the other "bad guys". Like parent post said, their goverments have no reason to do something like DDOS attacks against US. Who's to say its not just some individual who either is pissed at US/South Korea or has such political views, or does so for whatever reason? Stop blaming countries as a whole if you dont know it.
I'm sorry, but if this has nothing to do with Michael Jackson, apparently no one cares.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
US Government websites attacked... but slashdot is OK so what the heck.
Honestly, when was the last time you went to ftc.gov? Nobody goes to those sites...
Now if google, wiki, or itunes goes down, then PANIC!
Each of these machines has and IP address which it advertises every time it makes an attack. That's right folks: The return IP address is part of the header. You can't route packets without this information.
Not necessarily. For SYN flood the src address can be spoofed, since the attacker doesn't care if he gets the SYN-ACK.
What the ISPs could do for this is to filter outbound traffic such that if the src IP is not on their network (i.e., is spoofed) the packet is dropped.
I've heard this theory before and my first thought was: "Do they even have internet in North Korea?"
Well, do they?
You're right. The real enemy here is Microsoft! If we stopped Windows, we would stop the attacks. I think we should send the military to liberate Redmond.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.