[ISN] Russian 'cybermilitia' knocks Kyrgyzstan offline

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:09:20 -0600 (CST)
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=security&articleId=9126947

By Gregg Keizer
January 28, 2009 
Computerworld

A Russian "cybermilitia" has knocked the central Asian country of 
Kyrgyzstan off the Internet, a security researcher said today, 
demonstrating that the hackers are able to respond even faster than last 
year, when they waged a digital war against another former Soviet 
republic, Georgia.

Since Jan. 18, the two biggest Internet service providers in Kyrgyzstan 
have been under a "massive, sustained distributed denial-of-service 
attack," said Don Jackson, the director of threat intelligence at 
SecureWorks Inc.

The attacks, which are ongoing, have knocked most of the country offline 
and disrupted e-mail to and from a U.S. air base there, Jackson said. 
The public affairs officer at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan was not 
immediately available to answer questions about whether the attacks have 
disrupted operations or other activities.

According to Jackson, the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks 
-- essentially a flood of requests that overwhelm servers and 
effectively knock them off the Internet -- can be traced to the same 
groups of Russian and ethnic Russian hackers who assembled in 
militia-like fashion last August to launch similar attacks against 
Georgia.

[...]


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Received on Thu Jan 29 2009 - 02:09:20 PST

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