PC Magazine, By: Neil J. Rubenking, 11.29.2010
When WikiLeaks released another collection of secret U.S. government documents this weekend the site came under attack from a hacker styled th3j35t3r (the jester). In announcing the hit, th3j35t3r tweeted "TANGO DOWN – for attempting to endander the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations". A now-deleted tweet clarified that the WikiLeaks hit was a simple denial of service attack. F-Secure's Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hypponen, had this to say about the attack.
"It was a weird case," said Hypponen. "Everybody assumed it was some large-scale Distributed Denial of Service attack, but the guy himself says it's not. It's a protocol-based attack from a single source." Hypponen explained that WikiLeaks recovered by changing its hosting providers. At the time of the attack they were hosted in France. Now they're using two different servers hosted by Amazon's cloud, one of which is physically in the United States.
Asked if this type of attack could take down any arbitrary site Hypponen said "We just don't know. The guy isn't giving any details. But over the past months he has been quite successful taking down pro-Jihad forums and such. When he claimed responsibility for WikiLeaks I believed him right away. He had both the knowhow and the motive."
According to Hypponen, th3j35t3r characterizes himself as ex-military and likes to use military terms. His e-mail address is a Russian Hotmail account, but anybody could register for such an account. Hyponnen noted that it might be harder to get details about a Russian account
If you believe that WikiLeaks should be designated as a terrorist organization you may consider th3j35t3r's actions patriotic, even heroic. But if his attack techniques become widely known any web site could conceivably be a target.
Related Articles:
No comments:
Post a Comment