| Bad Guys Threaten Financial Websites 2006-12-01 by: badanov From the US Dept. of Homeland Security comes an advisory that elements inside Al Qaeda have warned about possible cyber attacks against US financial and banking websites starting today. SANS says the risk is low as do other internet threat sites. We read that attacks will be either denial of service attacks or database penetration attacks. Some time ago when we were trying to help Internet Haganah, we read about some of the software tools the crazier of the Islamic folks were planning to use and at that time they were at least a generation behind in that modern Unix kernels have safeguards already compiled in them for years. The software tools included such attacks as the ping of death and Teardrop, both of which can easily be defeated at the kernel level. So, denial of service attacks and database penetration are about all that are left in the repetoire. Most modern finacial sites have several levels of safeguards such as failover computers and databases that can take over should a server go down and such as load balancers, using web proxies and cross-updating database servers. Christmas would be an optimal time for a cyber attack against the USA, but the state of security especially with regard to financial systems are such that attacks really won't be much of a problem. At least, that's the plan. -----------------------------------------COMMENTS---------------------------------------- |