A while ago I wrote a post about having stumbled across a site on the uwnews domain that had been attacked. Yoshi reported the problem after determining it to be genuine and uwnews fixed the problem promptly. At the time, I took a snapshot of what the hacked site looked like and wanted to share it here for the curious.
The article is about the recent directive that was signed by President Bush to expand the intelligence community’s involvement to monitor against computer attacks on government systems. The reason for this intiative is because the increasing attacks to government sytems, particularly from China. The government agencies could have used tighter security standards, as well as standardizing those policies to make weaknesses more consistent and easier to find. However the monitoring of internet traffic causes privacy issues to arise. Allowing a federal department responsible for both communication and intelligence can cause the agencies to use information from both sides to invade privacy of US citizens. I think that many pro-privacy groups will take this negatively as the privacy rights of individuals may be compromised due to the broad nature of the agencies’ roles.
Recently I read an article about how undersea cables were cut, causing internet outages around the middle east. This has revealed how physically fragile the network is. Since so much of the traffic is routed through so few cables, it doesn’t seem particularly difficult for an organized group to attack them. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to do a security on the physical infrastructure of the internet.
(Read on …)
