U.S. monitoring Internet attacks (fwd)

Tue Aug 6 17:03:43 UTC 2002

Anyone have any specifics on this ? I haven't seen anything.

>From the Aug 6 2002 Chicago Tribune --
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/sns-internetattack.story

U.S. monitoring Internet attacks
By Ted Bridis

WASHINGTON -- The government was monitoring a series of electronic attacks
launched early today against U.S. Internet providers, hours after European
authorities passed warnings to the FBI predicting the attacks.

The impact from the attacks appeared limited, and there were no reports of
outages or even delayed e-mails.

A flood of data, spiking nearly 700 percent more than usual traffic, was
aimed at Internet providers and Web sites on the East coast starting about
2 a.m. EDT, then shifted toward providers and sites on the West coast,
said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But unlike some recent so-called "denial of service" attacks, which
employed hundreds or thousands of computers to overwhelm Web sites, this
latest attack appeared to be coming from a relatively small number of
machines, the official said. That has allowed Internet providers to
protect their networks more easily by filtering data from the attacking
computers.

The FBI issued a dramatic warning hours before the attacks started, based
on information from Italian authorities, the U.S. official said. The alert
cited "credible but non-specific information that wide-scale hacker
attacks" were planned against U.S. Web sites and Internet providers,
"possibly emanating from Western Europe."

The earliest attacks targeted East Coast companies, including some in
Virginia and Maryland, then shifted to target sites in Seattle, the
official said. The White House and FBI's National Infrastructure
Protection Center were monitoring the attacks.

Some experts indicated the attacks were so easily foiled that they did not
register any impact on the health of the Internet.

"We haven't seen anything out of the ordinary," said Chris Rouland of
Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems Inc., which sells protective
software to thousands of companies. "We're paying attention to any sites
that may go down."

Copyright  2002, The Associated Press