Eggs in one basket
One of the dangers of the tendency to place the distributed data from surveillance of social network sites and “deep packet inspection” (which just about “covers it all”) in a centralized data base (as currently being considered in the United Kingdom [1]), regardless of how well guarded, is that the central data base will be (most assuredly) the target of cyberattacks.
For governments, putting “all of your eggs in one (heavily guarded) basket,” is in fact helping your nation’s enemies to gather (widely distributed) information on your citizens (and military and infrastructure and financial institutions) by collecting it FOR them! (Note added July 9, 2009: … and building out THEIR [your enemy’s] infrastructure at your citizens’ expense. All the enemies of your country need to do is figure out how to break in, which is a substantially simpler problem than figuring out how to wire your country remotely. And this is another reason why surveillance is like a light saber….)
(I know, I know, it’s “TOTALLY secure.” 
Like, “TOTALLY, dude”…!)
Government Web sites (external) are under virtually constant attack. Access to the Web sites, necessary for folks to do their jobs, can be disrupted. (Note added July 9, 2009: …which, if you think about it, might be all that is necessary to take down a financial system, and a lot of other things.)
An example: U.S. government Web sites, including “those of the White House and the State Department – have been under attack since the Fourth of July, along with the financial and commercial sites like Yahoo Finance and the New York Stock Exchange,” as reported by cybersecurity experts today. (See also this article.)
The Department of Homeland Security, which is one of the targets, confirmed the attacks. Other targets include: Web sites in South Korea (including the president’s), The Washinton Post, and a number of U.S. government agencies, which were not named.
Joe Nazario, manager of security research at Arbor Networks in Ann Arbor Michigan said that there is some indication that the latest attack comes from China, but that he could not be certain of its origin. He said that the attack was of moderate size, involving “a few tens of thousands” of infected computers. (Hmmmm, I wonder if they are all running Windows….) (Note added July 13, 2009: Well, I guess they WERE! BIG surprise there…. 😉 ) (Note added July 9, 2009: The number of infected computers in his estimate differs from the substantially larger number reported in The New York Times online. Mr. Nazario indicated that the attacks were not particularly sophisticated, which would be, frankly, a good way to disguise initial probing attacks, so that they would be “dismissed” by experts as amateurish, both in the code used and number of computers in the botnet used.) Allan Paller of the SANS Institute said that the attack “is not a small thing.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, expressed his increasing concern over cyberattacks.
The latest attack was described as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, specifically an “http flood attack.” Some U.S. agencies were able to withstand the attack while others were not, as the result of disorganization of systems.
At the time that the CNN article was written, the latest attack was still underway.
-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo™
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