CERT DoS'd
Khoder bin Hakkin
hakkin at sarin.com
Thu Dec 6 09:33:31 PST 2001
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/20011205/tc/national_computer-security_site_attacked_1.html
National computer-security site attacked
By Robert Lemos CNET News.com
The Computer Emergency Response Team's Coordination Center, an
important
national clearinghouse for computer-security information, came
under attack
Wednesday, leaving its main Web site only intermittently
reachable.
The so-called denial-of-service attack
didn't affect the group's
ability to push security incident
information to its members,
but made public access to its sites a
crapshoot.
"We are working with our service providers
to resolve this
problem," Bill Pollak, public relations
coordinator for the
CERT Coordination Center, said in a
statement.
A denial-of-service attack can take one of
two forms: a flood
of data that overwhelms the Web server or
the bandwidth
leading to the server, or a specific
command crafted to disable
critical servers or Internet routers. The
CERT Coordination
Center (news - web sites) would not
identify which type
matched the attack it was suffering from.
The group, based at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh,
Penn., coordinates the communications among
the myriad
response teams scattered among U.S.
universities, companies
and government agencies.
It has public Web sites to inform both
members and
non-members of threats but also has private
networks capable
of alerting members to high-priority
computer-security
incidents.
Officials at the CERT Coordination Center
would not give
details of the attack but earlier
acknowledged that such attacks
are not uncommon. In May, the group suffered a similar attack.
"We get attacked every day," Richard D. Pethia, director of the
Networked Systems
Survivability Program at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering
Institute, said in a
May interview. "The lesson to be learned here is that no one is
immune to these kinds
of attacks. They cause operational problems, and it takes time
to deal with them."
The CERT Coordination Center is part of Carnegie Mellon's
Software Engineering
Institute.
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