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List:       isn
Subject:    [ISN] Virtual country 'nuked' on Net
From:       mea culpa <jericho () dimensional ! com>
Date:       1999-01-30 6:02:42
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Forwarded From: anon@iname.com

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_263000/263169.stm
Tuesday, January 26, 1999 Published at 15:01 GMT 
Virtual country 'nuked' on Net 
By Internet Correspondent Chris Nuttall 

The Indonesian Government is being blamed for a highly-organised attack on
computers in Ireland which brought down the East Timor virtual country
domain.
 
Connect-Ireland says it is lodging a formal protest with the Indonesian
Embassy in London after it was forced to shut down its systems, disrupting
its Internet service provision to 3,000 customers. 

The cracker attacks, perhaps the first of their kind orchestrated by a
government, began last Tuesday and, after a week, the domain guardian and
Internet Service Provider was still struggling to restore its services.

"E-Nazis" create chaos 

Only its home page was accessible, containing a statement headlined:
E-Nazis Creating Chaos on the Net. 

"The apparent aim of the attack was to disrupt the East Timorese Internet
domain [.tp], established only twelve months ago by the East Timorese
Project, " said the statement. 

The project was initiated by Connect-Ireland and the 1996 Nobel Prize
winners Ramos Horta and Bishop Belo. The main site, www.freedom.tp
returned a 404 Not Found error message on Tuesday.

"The perpetrators of this attack have not yet been identified, but the
Indonesian government is known to be extremely antagonistic towards this
display of virtual sovereignty," said the statement.

Robots mounted 18 attacks

Connect-Ireland's project director, Martin Maguire, told BBC News Online
that e-mail for customers was now being delivered and new passwords were
being issued.

He said crackers had been testing the servers' defences for the past nine
months before launching lightning simultaneous attacks from countries as
far apart as Australia, Japan, Holland and the United States.

"There were 18 simultaneous attacks on our server by robots trying to claw
down our defences," said Martin.

"This was a very high-level attack that had to be planned and
co-ordinated."

Once they had broken in, the crackers set up their own domain host,
need.tp, with the possible aim of using it for propaganda on East Timor.

A new style of war

Connect-Ireland responded with its "nuclear option" of a complete
shutdown. "We have re-invented ourselves in the space of a week, moving
platforms, using other versions of software on new hardware," said Martin.

He said other services in Japan and the United States had been hit by
similar attacks but were not reporting them for fear of bad publicity.

"This is the ostrich nature of the industry. But it's going to be the new
style of war. You can see these tactics becoming part of official
government policy and a potential weapon."

"And it can take place against real countries. Probably no government has
contingency plans for this, no government has mandatory reporting of such
incidents and there is no plan for managing the problem."

There was no-one available for comment at the Indonesian Embassy in London
on Tuesday. 

-o-
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