[Oorang]

From your link...U.S. officials said that an al Qaeda-connected cell in southwest Germany had been under 24-hour surveillance since the beginning of the year after some of its members were detected conducting surveillance on the headquarters of the U.S. European Command at Patch Barracks, near Stuttgart. The cell, officials said, is made up of members of the Islamic Jihad Group, a violent terrorist organization based in Uzbekistan. .

Thanks much for the reminder Joe. Quite handy that you could find your links from two years ago so quickly. I wish I could :-)

[callmejoe]

Thanks. But sometimes I’d trade an ability to dig up old links or obscure news trivia for an end to forgetting where I put my keys, getting to the grocery store and then forgetting half the list I had memorized, then rolling out of the store realizing I forgot where I parked the car.

Hoping everybody in Germany stays safe. But this might be like 2001 where we think it is coming from one direction and we get hit from the other. The Hamburg cell was in Germany but it migrated here.

Another summer 2001 parallel . . .

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/warnings/index.html#codered

(1-19 = 11/9?)

Code Red was a worm with multiple variants that first appeared in July 2001 and ultimately affected nearly 300,000 computers in the U.S. Exploiting a hole in Microsoft’s IIS Web servers, it was time sensitive based on the date: From days 1-19 of the month the worm would propagate; from days 20-27 it would launch a denial of service attack against a particular site, and from day 27 through the end of the month the worm would “sleep,” dormant in the computer. In Code Red’s first variation, the affected computers were programmed to launch a denial of service attack against the White House Web site at a certain date and time. If the assault worked, the hundreds of thousands of pings would have overwhelmed the Internet in nanoseconds. Richard Clarke, the president’s adviser for cyberspace security, worked with the nation’s Internet providers to thwart the attack by blocking traffic to the White House site. Other Web sites were shut down, however, and replaced by a message that read “Hacked by Chinese.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/interviews/dick.html

The Nimda attack. How did you hear about it, what was it about? What is the significance?

Nimda was actually more significant, but Nimda frankly didn’t get media attention, mainly because Nimda occurred right after Sept. 11. It was another example of the public/private sector cooperation. I was the director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center. I was up to my neck in responding to the events of Sept. 11 through the command post there at the headquarters. Then right on top of that, the Nimda virus struck.

Fortunately, we had built the kind of communication with the private sector that we were sharing information, pushing information out to the NIPC as to what the corrective actions were. Even with all of that, it proliferated across the world at a far greater rate than Code Red did. It rattled the Internet. But again, demonstrated the flexibility of the Internet — it didn’t come down, but it rattled significantly. It caused billions of dollars of damage, and we still don’t know who proliferated that virus.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE56709E20090709

South Korea, U.S. Web sites down for 3rd day on attack
Wed Jul 8, 2009 11:34pm EDT