http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172829.html By Brian McWilliams, Newsbytes WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 10 Dec 2001, 9:39 AM CST The security of five Internet servers operated by the U.S. General Accounting Office was breached Sunday by a hacking group known as Anti India Crew. Laura Kopelson, a spokesperson for the GAO, confirmed that a network intrusion had taken place and said the agency was investigating. According to Kopelson, the agency's main Web site at http://www.gao.gov was not affected, but she declined to provide further information. The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress. The agency "works to continuously improve the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of the federal government," according to the site. The compromised systems included two servers that handle the accounting office's e-mail, as well as a file transfer system and two Web servers, according to information obtained by Alldas and Safemode, two independent sites that keep records of such attacks. E-mails to the GAO's service for distributing daily reports and decisions bounced back today with "mailbox unavailable" error messages. All of the GAO systems were running the Linux operating system, according to Alldas records. Anti India Crew (AIC) posted a message at one of the defaced Web servers that included the statement: "We will hit the us/in/il government servers until there is peace around us!" AIC is part of a hacking coalition calling itself the Al-Qaeda Muslim Alliance. Other members include the GForce Pakistan hacking group and the Pakistan Hackerz Club. In recent months, AIC has attacked 28 Web sites in India. The GAO servers were the first U.S. government systems compromised by the group, according to Alldas records. Safemode's mirror of the GAO defacements is at http://www.safemode.org/mirror/2001/12/09/ftp.gao.gov . The Alldas mirror is at http://defaced.alldas.de/mirror/2001/12/10/titan.gao.gov . - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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