-----Original Message----- From: NIPC Watch [mailto:nipc.watch@private] Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2003 7:09 AM To: Information Technology Subject: [Information_technology] Daily News 4/02/03 April 01, Government Computer News At DHS, the systems add up. The Department of Homeland Security so far has identified 2,500 mission-critical systems as part of an IT inventory it expects to complete by June, CIO Steve Cooper said today. He spoke at the Secure E-Biz conference sponsored by the Interoperability Clearing House of Alexandria, Virginia. So far, the department's systems inventory is 40 percent complete, Cooper said. He added that his staff has counted 50,000 items in its IT infrastructure, which comprises the assets of 22 agencies. He said the department's IT team is struggling with two parallel initiatives: bringing an operational capability up to speed and working on a long-range architecture. "We accept that some [systems] will have to be re-architected or replaced" once the enterprise architecture is final, Cooper said. Source: http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/21550-1.html March 31, Federal Computer Week Cyberwarriors guard virtual front. As coalition forces continue to engage the enemy throughout Iraq, the number of battles being fought in cyberspace also has risen, according to one Army information assurance officer. Col. Mark Spillers, information assurance program manager in the Coalition Forces Land Component Command communications office at Camp Doha, Kuwait, said "if a device is thought to be compromised, it is immediately isolated, taken off the network and scanned for viruses." Spillers said he could not go into any details about how the Army is protecting its systems or if any have been compromised." On the physical battlefield, if troops are in danger of being defeated, procedures are in place to safeguard or even destroy endangered equipment and systems to keep sensitive data from falling into enemy hands. Source: http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003/middle_east/web-warrior s-03-31-03.asp March 31, Washington Post DHS: Chinese hack attacks likely. Chinese hacker groups are planning attacks on U.S.- and U.K.-based Web sites to protest the war in Iraq, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned in an alert Monday. The hackers are planning "distributed denial-of-service" attacks, which render Web sites and networks unusable by flooding them with massive amounts of traffic. They also are planning to deface selected Web sites, according to the alert, though the government said it did not know when the attacks would occur. The DHS said it got the information by monitoring an online meeting that the hackers held last weekend to coordinate the attacks. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60363-2003Mar31.html March 29, Washington Post Computer support staff at home is crucial to war effort. To a greater extent than any war before it, Operation Iraqi Freedom depends on an elite group of technicians, engineers and other specialists in the United States who are standing by 24 hours a day, seven days a week to assist the troops. Pentagon officials have called this conflict a "network centric" one, with computers and wireless technology linking intelligence from the 250,000 U.S. troops and the drones, tanks, planes and other vehicles in a way that has compressed decision-making from what in the past might have been days into minutes. A single mix-up, glitch or crash in the technology could cost lives. So far, the technology has held up well, and there have been few major problems, according to about a dozen of the contractors who provide technical support services to the military. Working in classified "safe rooms" or reachable via pagers and cell phones around the country, they have been working behind the scenes to make sure the multitude of software and hardware systems is working properly. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44712-2003Mar 28.html?referrer=email March 28, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Hackers strike Georgia Tech computer, gain credit card data. Computer hackers invaded a computer at Georgia Tech and copied names, addresses and -- in some cases -- credit card information for 57,000 patrons of the Ferst Center for the Arts in Atlanta. Tech said the database held credit card records for about two-thirds of the 57,000 people. The hackers had access to the computer between February 4 and March 14, when the attack was discovered. There's no evidence any credit card numbers have been used by hackers. Tech sent letters to patrons this week warning of "a potentially serious security breach." Tech's computer security experts discovered the attack through internal monitoring, said Bob Harty, a Tech spokesman. Source: http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/business/0303/28hacker.html March 28, Associated Press Utah ISP is victim of retaliation following hackers' attack on al-Jazeera. The Salt Lake City-based Internet service provider Networld Connections became the unwitting tool of hackers attacking Arab television network al-Jazeera, and then was itself struck by a retaliatory attack, possibly from anti-war hackers. The original hackers, impersonating an al-Jazeera employee, tricked the Web addressing company Network Solutions into making technical changes that effectively turned over temporary control of the network's Arabic and English Web sites. "We have no idea who the hacker is, but now there is a 'denial-of-service' attack going on against us because of what happened," Ken Bowman, Networld's president and chief executive, said late Thursday. Bowman said the attacks were from all over the world, but seemed concentrated most from nations such as Russia, China and France that have among the most vocal opponents of the U.S.-British coalition's attack. Source: http://www.trib.com/AP/wire_detail.php?wire_num=37813 Internet Security Systems - AlertCon: 1 out of 4 https://gtoc.iss.net/ Last Changed 25 March 2003 Security Focus ThreatCon: 1 out of 4 www.securityfocus.com Last Changed 1 April 2003 Current Virus and Port Attacks Virus: #1 Virus in USA: WORM_LOVGATE.F 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), 25 (smtp), 113 (ident), 445 (microsoft-ds), 139 (netbios-ssn), 4662 (eDonkey2000), 53 (domain), 0 (---) Source: http://isc.incidents.org/top10.html; Internet Storm Center _______________________________________________ Information_technology mailing list Information_technology@listserv
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