FC: White House offline in apparent hacker attack; monitor app

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Tue May 22 2001 - 16:25:17 PDT

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    I've created a monitoring program so we can watch, in near-real-time, as 
    the poor network admins at the White House scramble to bring the First 
    Homepage back online:
    http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/
    
    As you can tell, whitehouse.gov has been up and down more than the NASDAQ 
    (0 KB sizes mean the site was unreachable):
    http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/data/www.whitehouse.gov
    
    Though as recently as 7:09 pm ET, my 'bot did manage to grab a snapshot 
    (broken links are normal):
    http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/snap/www.whitehouse.gov.5-22-2001.19-9-0
    
    Stay tuned...
    
    -Declan
    
    ---
    
    http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43993,00.html
    
        Woe Unto White House Site
        By Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
        3:30 p.m. May 22, 2001 PDT
    
        WASHINGTON -- President Bush's recurring problems with the First
        Homepage just won't go away.
    
        Malicious hackers appear to be responsible for replacing the executive
        branch's official site with a near-empty black screen and references
        to a previous break-in, which dedicated visitors were able to glimpse
        during one of the brief periods whitehouse.gov was reachable on
        Tuesday.
    
        A White House spokesman said he could not provide details, but
        repeated attempts to connect showed the website was unreachable for at
        least five hours and was still offline as of 6:45 p.m. EDT.
    
        Around 3:45 p.m., a black page with three items -- two dead links to
        news articles and a link to a mirror of a previous hack -- showed up
        on the whitehouse.gov home page.
    
        The apparent intrusion, which comes during a time of heightened
        alertness because of threats from pro-China hackers, caps a four-month
        period during which the First Homepage has been savaged by critics
        calling it the state-of-the-rt -- five years ago. Occasional typos and
        sections that are still "coming soon" don't help.
    
        But even if his staff has to restore from tape backups, President Bush
        still plans to redesign and relaunch his homepage in the next month or
        so.
    
        [...]
    
    
    
    
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