Country of Origin for Malicious Attacks

Thu Jun 26 02:15:53 UTC 2003

On Wed, 25 Jun 2003 sgorman1 at gmu.edu wrote:
> I was wondering if folks had noticed any trends with malicious network
> attacks predominantly originating from any individual or group of
> countries.  Any observations, comments or help would be greatly
> appreciated.

If you believe the Vatican, its mostly American's doing the attacking.
Although as a practical matter, I don't know if anyone really has good
information about the true country of origin.  In most cases, its the
country of last-hop.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/scitech/SciTechRepublish_887398.htm
 "The Vatican has revealed it has taken on a team of experts to protect
 the Pope's website which is attacked by some 10,000 viruses a month and
 at least 30 mainly American hackers every day."

Trivia: Unlike the usual Unix practice of naming things after demons,
the Vatican named its security computers after Archangels.  The Vatican
firewall was called Michael, after the Archangel charged with guarding
the gates of heaven with a flaming sword.