HACK
re...@ecn.ab.ca
The rash of government site hacks continued Tuesday, as a key storm
predictor and a NASA site were defaced and pulled offline.
The storm prediction center, run by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, remained down as of 6:30 PM PT, though a
spokesman told ZDTV News that it was due back online more than an
hour before that. The NASA site also remained down as of press time.
The NOAA hack drew particular attention, because the site offers
information on potential life-threatening storms, including
tornadoes.
NOAA spokesman Tim Tomastik said that while only the Storm
Prediction Center's home page was defaced, the organization pulled
the entire site and its e-mail servers offline "as a precautionary
measure."
Tomastik said that "many emergency managers were inconvenienced by
this, because they've come to use our Web site . . . as a very
convenient way to get the information right from the horse's mouth."
At the same time, he noted that the site is not a primary source of
such information, so the hack did not seriously affect users.
B.K. DeLong, a computer security consultant in Boston, said that the
NOAA hack was irresponsible, given the nature of the site, but did
not appear malicious.
"It's another situation of kids hacking a site because they can,"
DeLong said.
But in the wake of a Government Accounting Office report that was
highly critical of security measures at government sites, and a
high-profile hack of the U.S. Army home page Sunday, he raised the
question of who's minding the store.
"We don't vindicate hacking, but what about the hackers we don't
hear about, people doing industrial espionage and foreign hackers
who are breaking into the machines? You see army.mil being hacked
and NASA being hacked even after the GAO report. Army.mil is the
main site of the army and it kind of makes you wonder who's
administering these sites," DeLong said.
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Graham-John Bullers
moderator of alt.2600.moderated
email : re...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca | ab...@freenet.toronto.on.ca