U.S. Government Web Sites Are Attacked by Unidentified Hackers - Bloomberg.com
By Gopal Ratnam and Juliann Neher
July 9 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. government and private company websites were attacked during the July 4 holiday weekend and early this week by hackers who haven’t been identified, officials said.
Web sites of the U.S. departments of
State,
Treasury and
Transportation as well
NYSE Euronext, the world’s largest owner of stock exchanges, were affected. The exchange said it was notified by authorities that it had been the target of a cyber attack aimed at slowing or shutting down its Web site. Market data and trading systems were not at risk, it said.
The
Department of Homeland Security was aware of the attacks and its Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or CERT, was advising government agencies and private companies on “steps to take to mitigate against such attacks,”
Amy Kudwa, a spokeswoman for the department, said in an e-mail yesterday.
The attacks are known as distributed denial of service, a common practice by hackers who commandeer remote computers to flood targeted Web sites with a large volume of data that renders the sites inaccessible to other users. Kudwa said she didn’t have information on reports by Seoul-based Yonhap News that North Korea may have orchestrated the effort.
The attack on the State Department’s
state.gov site started July 5, department spokesman
Ian Kelly said at the daily briefing with reporters yesterday. “It’s still ongoing, but I’m told it’s much reduced right now,” he said. He also said that he hadn’t noticed “any real difficulties” in accessing the site. He declined to speculate on who was responsible.
‘Particularly Aggressive’
Although attacks that lead to service denials are common, the assault on government and private networks that began during the weekend “was particularly aggressive,” Representative
Jim Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a phone interview.
Government agencies and private companies are working “very well together and are getting better at identifying and improving our ability to respond,” Langevin said. Eventually, with better coordination, such attacks can be prevented, he said.
Langevin said it was premature to say the attacks came from any one country. The
National Security Agency is working to identify the perpetrators and “I’m very confident we will have a very good sense of where it originated and who’s responsible,” he said.
Attacks Every Day
“We see attacks on federal networks every single day,” said
Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman. Preventive measures have minimized impact and the assault “had absolutely no effect on the White House’s day-to-day operations,” he said. .........
moar here
U.S. Government Web Sites Are Attacked by Unidentified Hackers - Bloomberg.com