[BC] Internet attacks

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

As reported this morning by the Associated Press;
"WASHINGTON — The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange.

Other targets of the attack included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post. According to an early analysis of the malicious software used in the attacks, many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained computer assaults."

My question; what kind of idiots run these Government sites? It is trivial to thwart an external attack!

You just take the affected servers off-line by removing them from DNS lookups (leaving them actually running to corral the attacks), and adding the backup servers to the DNS. No backup servers? Idiots them all, if true.

For those interested, the same data (the Web-pages, account information, etc) gets accessed internally from secure file-servers (cloud computing, etc) so there is no interruption of service. The attacked computers continue to run so that the attackers have something to spend their CPU cycles attacking.

Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Book: http://www.AbominableFirebug.com/