[107690] in Cypherpunks
CDR: Gov Sites Beseiged
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Young)
Thu Jan 21 12:17:25 1999
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 12:00:01 -0500
To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Reply-To: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
NYT reports today on the trashing of the US Information
Agency Web site, in two attacks, the first a simple replacement
of the opening page with a spoof, the second by a planted
Trojan Horse that was overlooked by the experts fixing the
first. The second did serious damage to the whole system,
the report says, and the FBI is pursuing the culprit, which
shouldn't be hard since he/she left a colorful link to a home
page, zyklon.org, or maybe a spoofer did that to screw LoU.
We happened to have logged in shortly after the first attack
and grabbed the spoof page, by "Zyklon" who may or may
not have been Lewis Olsen -- anybody heard?
http://jya.com/zyklon-hits.htm
The USIA site is still out of commission today. Zyklon also hit
"nato50.gov" and "21stcentury.gov." 21st is up again, but not
nato50.
Then there's the problem BXA has been having for several
days, though it has not identified the cause beyond claiming
"technical problems."
And the main NIST site went down yesterday, although the
Boulder branch is okay. That took down CSRC, our nation's
second best computer security operation. This was a short
while after I spoke to a NIST rep who said the top dogs were
at RSA99 until next Monday.
A rumor is that a top NIST compsec official is moving to NSA,
if that's a clue to the takedowns.
