Centre Daily Times:
Election week news was replete with headlines such as “Chinese hack into White House network” and “Foreign governments attack White House, Obama, McCain systems.” The scheduled subject of this month’s column — Patrick D. McDaniel, associate professor in Penn State’s computer science and engineering department and co-director of the Systems and Internet Infrastructure Security Laboratory — canceled our interview that week, the day before it was to take place, citing “an emergency.”

Perhaps this was a coincidence (only the lowest, unclassified White House system was breached), perhaps not. McDaniel serves on several executive and congressional cybersecurity committees.

Although the attacks occurred “over a period of months” beginning this summer, their impact was just publicly reported this month. The cyberattackers reportedly “accessed the White House computer system for brief periods, allowing them enough time to steal information before U.S. computer experts patched the system.”

A “serious amount of files” had been loaded off the systems of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Mc- Cain — also by Chinese attackers. It was reported that these attacks were aimed at gaining policy/negotiating strategy and leverage.

Companies and academic/ educational institutions are also increasingly under attack. According to the annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, released Nov. 11, distributed denial of service attacks were the greatest IT security challenge.

“For the first time, this year ISPs also describe a far more diversified security landscape, including significant concerns over domain name system spoofing, border gateway protocol hijacking and spam.” Read on…

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By Master Money on December 1st, 2008
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