FC: White House offline in apparent hacker attack; monitor app

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

I've created a monitoring program so we can watch, in near-real-time, as 
the poor network admins at the White House scramble to bring the First 
Homepage back online:
http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/

As you can tell, whitehouse.gov has been up and down more than the NASDAQ 
(0 KB sizes mean the site was unreachable):
http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/data/www.whitehouse.gov

Though as recently as 7:09 pm ET, my 'bot did manage to grab a snapshot 
(broken links are normal):
http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/snap/www.whitehouse.gov.5-22-2001.19-9-0

Stay tuned...

-Declan

---

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43993,00.html

   Woe Unto White House Site
   By Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)
   3:30 p.m. May 22, 2001 PDT

   WASHINGTON -- President Bush's recurring problems with the First
   Homepage just won't go away.

   Malicious hackers appear to be responsible for replacing the executive
   branch's official site with a near-empty black screen and references
   to a previous break-in, which dedicated visitors were able to glimpse
   during one of the brief periods whitehouse.gov was reachable on
   Tuesday.

   A White House spokesman said he could not provide details, but
   repeated attempts to connect showed the website was unreachable for at
   least five hours and was still offline as of 6:45 p.m. EDT.

   Around 3:45 p.m., a black page with three items -- two dead links to
   news articles and a link to a mirror of a previous hack -- showed up
   on the whitehouse.gov home page.

   The apparent intrusion, which comes during a time of heightened
   alertness because of threats from pro-China hackers, caps a four-month
   period during which the First Homepage has been savaged by critics
   calling it the state-of-the-rt -- five years ago. Occasional typos and
   sections that are still "coming soon" don't help.

   But even if his staff has to restore from tape backups, President Bush
   still plans to redesign and relaunch his homepage in the next month or
   so.

   [...]




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