Free Republic

"A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely." Just asking... Plenty of articles on here lately like the gentleman who painted a sign on a truck in his cornfield, and someone who didn't like the message set it ablaze. If...

Imagine this scenario: Estonia, a NATO member, is cut off from the Internet by cyber attackers who besiege the country's bandwidth with a devastating denial of service attack. Then, the nation's power grid is attacked, threatening economic disruption and even causing loss of life as emergency services are overwhelmed. As international outcry swells, outside researchers determine the attack is being sponsored by a foreign government and being directed from a military base. Desperate and outgunned in tech resources, Estonia invokes Article 5 of the NATO Treaty -- an attack against one member nation is an attack against all. It requests...

Peter Schiff's campaign website has been repeatedly targeted by cyber attackers, his brother and spokesman said this afternoon. The campaign has notified the FBI. Schiff, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, had planned a "moneybomb'' -- a one-day online fundraising blitz -- for today, but just minutes before midnight, when the moneybomb was set to start, the website went down, his brother, Andrew Schiff, said. "These are coordinated attacks,'' Andrew Schiff said in a brief phone interview. It wasn't the first time the website has been hit, Andrew Schiff said. The campaign had been targeted several times in the past...

Note: The following text is a quote: Former CEO of YouSendIt Charged with Denial of Service of Attack SAN JOSE, CA—Khalid Shaikh, a former CEO of YouSendIt Inc., was indicted by a federal grand jury yesterday with four counts of mail fraud, United States Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello announced. The indictment states that between December 2008 and June 2009 Shaikh used the ApacheBench software program to launch four denial of service (DOS) attacks against YouSendIt’s servers. Each DOS attack temporarily rendered the servers incapable of handling legitimate network traffic and deprived YouSendIt’s customers use of the company’s services. YouSendIt is...

I've been getting a lot of "Service Temporarily Unavailable" pages this morning - and noticing the number of double- and even triple-posts, others are getting it too....

Facebook Inc. is providing new details of how an attack aimed at a Georgian blogger Thursday disrupted its site and crashed others, including Twitter Inc. and LiveJournal Inc. The company rooted out the cause of the massive denial-of-service attack, said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, after noticing that the compromised computers that began flooding its site Thursday morning were directing traffic to the profile page of a single pro-Georgian blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia. The Cyxymu blogger couldn't immediately be reached. In a blog post Friday, Twitter co-founder Biz...

Profile of a real cyberwar Beware the mayhem of malware on the march By Aaron Mannes and James Hendler | Wednesday, August 5, 2009 The denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that started on July 4 garnered typical headlines about cyberwar, but in fact, from a technical standpoint, those "attacks" may be the opposite of real cyberwar. A much less noticed report in Israel's leading daily, Ha'aretz, on Israel's operations against Iran's nuclear program may give greater insight into how cyberwar actually will work. It is no secret that several countries, including the United States, China, Russia and Israel, have examined cyberwar capabilities....

A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality AUGUST 4--At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed "Dex", heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity--vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and...

The Flashrom utility is developed by the CoreBoot project (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) as a way to read, write, erase, and verify flash ROM chips. Flashrom has been in development for quite a while (nearly a decade), but now they have finally come out with a version 0.9.0 release and soon expect to reach a 1.0 status. This utility supports nearly every x86 motherboard after having worked on support for over 150 flash chip families (and many various for each family), 75 different chipsets, workarounds for non-standard motherboards, and there is no need for CD-ROM or floppy disk. Previously Linux...

On Thursday, April 16, in a Council chamber overflowing with students, the Student Council of American River College voted 11-5 to pass a resolution putting the 42,000-student Community College on record as opposing the LGBT National "Day of Silence". "The passage of this resolution marks new progress for Community Colleges," commented Vladimir Musorivschi. "The 'Day of Silence' project has been used as an opportunity to suspend Christian students at local schools for wearing Bible verses on their shirts. The 'Day of Silence' is truly about silencing the voices of Christian students and we will oppose this censorship."

MassResistance has allied with 22 pro-family groups across America to confront the homosexual propaganda event "Day of Silence", which is being held in public schools across America - and particularly in Massachusetts - on Friday, April 17, 2009. The theme of the action is Day of Silence Walk Out. The message to parents is: Keep your kids home that day, and let the school administration know why you're doing it. The action is being spearheaded by the Illinois Family Institute. During the Day of Silence, which has become an annual day-long event, school officials encourage students to be silent for...

Received last night via Email. Tax Day Tea Party Issues with TaxDayTeaParty.com - Explanation Posted: 29 Mar 2009 06:44 PM PDT An international effort to shut down the TaxDayTeaParty.com website has been detected by our technical staff. Internet experts commonly call this type of attack a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. Corrective measures are being implemented, and the site should be fully accessible again within 48 hours. Unfortunately, these DOS attacks are very difficult to trace. In this case, the attacks have come from both domestic and international sources. All we know for certain at this point is that a...

Iraq will not allow Blackwater Worldwide to continue providing security protection for U.S. diplomats in the country, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Thursday. (snip) The decision not to issue Blackwater an operating license was due to "improper conduct and excessive use of force," said Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf.

Nothing here. Thank God FR is back. Anyone feel this way? Do we have any idea what caused it???

Things are a-brewin’ in Sweden. Sweden is not just home of the infamous bikini team, it is also the home of Outpost 24, an equally sexy software-as-a-service network scanning service, and the employer of my friend Robert E. Lee and his colleague Jack C. Louis. These guys are the inventors of UnicornScan, a user-land TCP stack turned into a port scanner. Never heard of it? Use Nmap exclusively? Well if you run Linux, I suggest checking it out, especially if missed ports in your portscan is inexcusable. But I digress. Robert and Jack are smart dudes. I've known them for...

<p>Chicago radio station WGN-AM is again coming under attack from the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for offering airtime to a controversial author. It is the second time in recent weeks the station has been the target of an "Obama Action Wire" alert to supporters of the Illinois Democrat.</p>

Engagement in the battle of ideas and strategic communication has long been the missing ingredient in the government-wide effort to combat terrorism. Now, with a restructured public diplomacy bureaucracy at the State Department and elsewhere in the interagency process, engaging foreign publics has formally and strategically become part of the toolkit to combat radical extremist ideologies. Today, in his first major public address in his new position in Washington, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James Glassman addressed The Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Special Policy Forum on "Winning the War of Ideas." The prepared...

April 15th is the National Day of Shouting. (This is not for the IRS reason.) The National Day of Shouting is being observed in many public high schools across the nation. Students, faculty and staff are asked to shout in all school situations to draw attention to the ignorance, apathy and injustice of our society toward those who are RM (Racially Misassigned). An unnamed representative of the RMA (Racially Misassigned Americans) explains racial misassignment thusly: “We are not talking about the fact that most all of us Americans are of varied racial backgrounds, we are talking about the fact that...

WASHINGTON - The State Department's acerbic top auditor wasn't happy when Justice Department officials told one of his aides to leave the room so they could discuss a criminal investigation of Blackwater Worldwide, the contractor protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The episode reveals the badly strained relationship between Bush administration officials over the probe into whether Blackwater smuggled weapons into Iraq that could have gotten into insurgents' hands. As a result of the bureaucratic crosscurrents between State's top auditor and Justice, the investigation has been bogged down for months.

[EXCERPT] The State Department said it was not aware of letter to the lawmakers but defended the pro-democracy programs. "Congress authorized this funding for us to be able to do things like expand radio and television broadcasting into Iran ... to be able to allow (Iranians) to hear subversive things like the truth," said State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey. "I don't think anyone would likely suggest that is a bad idea or something that we should stop," he said.[EXCERPT]