Government Web Sites Suffer Independence Day Attack
On July 4th, as U.S. citizens celebrated the War of Independence, unknown cybercriminals launched a concentrated attack on several Federal Web sites. According to Associated Press reports, the unusually sophisticated attack affected Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Transportation Department Web sites.Sources familiar with the situation believe the elaborate assault to be an orchestrated denial-of-service attack, which typically involves flooding a particular Web site with traffic in order to force it offline. Ben Rushlo of Keynote Systems, a Web site monitoring firm that watches 40 government sites, said that the Transportation Department site was completely down for two days, while the FTC site was still being affected as late as Tuesday night. Other similar attacks also affected South Korean government sites over the weekend, but officials are uncertain whether or not the attacks were related.
While government site operators do constantly scan for threats, such attacks are becoming increasingly common. A June Government Accountability Office report stated that in 2008 there were 16,000 more reported threats by federal agencies than there were in 2007. Homeland Security also revealed that there was a significant increase in breaches of U.S. government computers from 2007 to 2008. Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for Homeland Security, toed the company line and said that government agencies had all been alerted to the Independence Day cyber-invasion, and that measures had been taken to fend off future attacks and minimize their effects.
Considering this alarming new attack, reports that cybercrime cost the Pentagon over $100 million in six months, and news that an entire California town recently came under assault, Obama's proposal for a cybersecurity czar is becoming exponentially more urgent. Whoever it is will most certainly have their work cut out for them. [From: AP/Google News]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
dpil1 said 1:25AM on 7-09-2009
well that's more proof that our country's cybersecurty is horrible
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