-----Original Message----- From: NIPC Watch [mailto:nipc.watch@private] Sent: Monday, March 24, 2003 7:34 AM To: Information Technology Subject: [Information_technology] Daily News 3/24/03 March 24, Washington Post Telecom firms rebuild, beef up security. Since the terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon crippled communications networks along the East Coast, telecommunications companies have invested heavily to fortify their facilities. All over the country, telecommunications companies have added fiber-optic lines, increased their ability to reroute traffic and beefed up their security in response to lessons learned in the September 2001 attacks. Jeffrey M. Goldthorp, chief of network technology at the Federal Communications Commission, has been working with the nation's leading telecommunications companies for the past year. He was reluctant to discuss specifics but did point to one unnamed company that he said recently moved a huge database to a hardened underground shelter. The database will be a key resource in case the network, or any section of it, needs to be rebuilt. The FCC also recently orchestrated a series of "mutual aid" contracts between companies that allow them to work together immediately after a disaster without having to negotiate costs or other legal issues. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A653-2003Mar20 .html?referrer=email March 20, SecurityFocus Hackers claim NSA breach. Hackers claim to have compromised a computer at the National Security Agency (NSA). However, instead of obtaining a cache of highly-classified documents about the NSA's global surveillance work, the purported hackers mostly found biographies of agency personnel, and a handful of routine, correspondences between NSA spokespersons and media outlets. Journalist and NSA expert James Bamford says the apparent breach probably isn't a threat to national security. "I certainly don't think that it's acceptable that even unclassified computers can be hacked into there, but it doesn't sound like they've gotten beyond the non-classified computers in public affairs," said Bamford. An e-mail message sent to the hackers' address in Switzerland was not immediately answered Thursday. The group signed their message "Nescafé Open Up", the slogan of an ad campaign for flavored instant-coffee. The hackers' motives are unknown at this time. Source: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/3291 March 20, National Journal's Technology Daily Ridge: Cybersecurity at 'heart' of department's work. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Tom Ridge said on Thursday that his department will work as hard to address threats to the Internet as it does to address physical threats. "We will not distinguish between physical and cyber in this new unit," Ridge told the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee in a hearing on the fiscal 2004 budget. Ridge said that he understands a cyber attack could affect every aspect of the U.S. economy and government and that preventing such an attack is "at the very heart" of his department's duties. He also said that since last month, the department has been "actively engaged" in talks about the nation's cyber infrastructure with the private sector and other groups "because they have their own list of what the vulnerabilities are." Much rests on the vulnerability assessments being done on critical infrastructures, he said. Ridge said the department's chief information officer is developing plans for a technology framework that would enable Homeland Security to share information both within and outside the department. A strategic plan to let the department's various agencies access terrorist watch lists also is being prepared, he said. Source: http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0303/032003td1.htm March 20, InternetWeek War information demand slows U.S. military, Arab, alternative news sites. The Arab news site Al Jazeera, U.S. military sites, and a U.S. alternative press site were among those suffering massive slowdowns and outages in the first day of the war in Iraq, according to Web performance measurement firm Keynote Systems. The slowdowns and outages were presumed to be due to overwhelming demand for access to information, rather than hacker attacks, s aid Eric Siegel, principle Internet consultant for Keynote. Likewise, British government sites are seeing significant slowdowns and outages. Siegel speculated that the entire online Arab world is turning to Al Jazeera for news, whereas the West has a diversity of sources online. Source: http://www.internetweek.com/webDev/showArticle.jhtml?article ID=7900136 March 19, SecurityFocus Point, click, get root on Yahoo. A simple scan for unpublished websites within Yahoo's Internet address space gave an unemployed IT worker access to several of the portal company's internal systems, including root access inside the company firewall, the worker says. Yahoo URLs provided by the man routed to what appeared to be two unprotected Web-based remote administration consoles for company disk and file storage systems. In a written statement, Yahoo spokesperson Mary Osako acknowledged that the servers shouldn't have been exposed to the Internet, and said the company closed off access on Wednesday. "No user data was compromised," Osako wrote. The IT worker, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed Yahoo's statement. Source: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/3249 Internet Security Systems - AlertCon: 2 out of 4 https://gtoc.iss.net/ Last Changed 18 March 2003 Security Focus ThreatCon: 1 out of 4 www.securityfocus.com Last Changed 24 March 2003 Current Virus and Port Attacks Virus: #1 Virus in USA: PE_FUNLOVE.4099 Source: http://wtc.trendmicro.com/wtc/wmap.html, Trend World Micro Virus Tracking Center [Infected Computers, North America, Past 24 hours, #1 in United States] Top 10 Target Ports: 80 (www), 137 (netbios-ns), 1434 (ms-sql-m), 445 (microsoft-ds), 25 (smtp), 139 (netbios-ssn), 6346 (gnutella-svc), 4662 (eDonkey2000), 0 (---), 113 (ident) Source: http://isc.incidents.org/top10.html; Internet Storm Center _______________________________________________ Information_technology mailing list Information_technology@listserv
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