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Massive botnet targets US govt websites

Powerful cyberattack also attacks South Korea

The US government has been the victim of a cyber attack of unusual veracity.

A botnet comprised of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against US government websites and causing headaches for businesses in the US and South Korea.

The attack started Saturday, and security experts have credited it with knocking the US Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) website offline for parts of Monday and Tuesday. Several other government websites have also been targeted, including the US Department of Transportation (DOT).

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"The DOT has been experiencing network incidents since this past weekend. We are working with the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team [US-CERT] at this time," a DOT spokeswoman said Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for the US Department of the Treasury confirmed that the Treasury's website had been hit with a denial-of-service attack. "We're working with our service provider to mitigate the impact," she said.

A spokeswoman for the FTC could not say what caused the outage at that agency's website, and the US-CERT did not return calls seeking comment.

Other targets have included banking websites in Korea, US Bancorp, the US Secret Service, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of State, the White House, the US Department of Defense, the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the Washington Post, according to security researchers studying the incident.

The attack, while powerful, is not particularly sophisticated and appears to be more of a nuisance than a threat to security. It uses a variety of well-known distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that try to overwhelm websites with useless requests and make them unavailable for legitimate users, security experts say. Most of the targeted sites appeared to be working normally on Tuesday.




It is also unusual to see relatively low-profile government websites being hit. "Who goes around targeting a site like the FAA or the US Treasury? It's not something that most people would think to attack," Stewart said.

The FTC in the past has brought actions against spammers and internet fraudsters. Last month it shut down an internet service provider called Pricewert, which had been associated with botnets, spam and child pornography.


The fact that the DDoS attack took down government computers is an embarrassment to the US, which is working to strengthen the country's cyber-security defences under President Barack Obama.



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