NASA Watch Service Disruption
Marc’s note: As some of you have noticed NASA Watch was offline for nearly a day. This was the result of a Denial of Service attack that was directed specifically at NASA Watch (it would appear) and not our other websites. We are working with our ISP to determine the source of the attack.
TEA Party in Space has also suffered a DDoS attack – we are still down.
Our entire database is corrupt.
Chinese cyber attack also today against the U.S. military.
We are back – but sweet mother of pearl.
WHISKEY
TANGO
FOXTROT
We need to clean up something we did not see before.
The Chinese and Iranians have had it with you NASA doubters! 🙂 Better get with the program!
A denial of service attack is usually done by flooding a web site with connection requests, making it too busy to allow other, legitimate connections.
If your data base was corrupted that could mean someone actually broke into one or more servers, which would probably result in more exploitation activity, like planting “backdoors” on web servers to enable future break-in capability.
Also, there is a possibility that users’ passwords have been stolen, and it might be a good idea for users to change their passwords now.
It was a full frontal DOS. No passwords, backdoors, etc. Attacks can break things as a result.
‘full frontal’! Keith! Don’t get us excited!
It was the Tea Party in Space who had their database corrupted. And yes, that would imply more than just a DDoS. Thankfully the integrity of our databases were not compromised as they exists separate from the network that was attacked.
Your tweet yesterday said you were down “due to a database issue.”
I never saw that tweet. Just looked now. Keith tweeted that. It was a premature tweet before we had diagnosed the complete problem. At no time were the databases compromised. The attacker simply overloaded the NASA Watch web servers with DDoS requests which led to the downtime. We’re working to minimize this type of attack with our ISP.
I read a few years ago about a company or US agency developing software that would in realtime trace back to the source of an internet attack and would inflict worse damage on said attacker automatically. It’s events like these that make me wish such things did exist.
Robin:
The ability to ‘hurt’ digital assailants have been around for some time. Unfortunately this really only works for individual attacks on ‘ports’ other than the ones used for web page traffic, not a mass attack like what happened here.
NasaWatch’s service provider can trace the source of the attack but it would probably only lead to ‘slave’ or ‘zombie’ computers that have been compromised by the assailants as well. Even forensics on those machines may not lead to the source if they planned their attack properly.
Considering that this outage snapped on and off like a light switch, I’d assume someone had control of the attack. because of that, it may have been a ‘message’. I don’t think NasaWatch content is controversial enough to warrant that sort of treatment.
“…probably just some campers hunting ‘coons.” – lieutenant commenting on some brush fires just before he gets offed by the Martians. From Orson Welles Mercury Theater version of H. G. Wells ‘War of the Worlds’.
tinker
That’s how you know your work is appreciated and you are doing valuable public service, when the hackers besiege. Keep up the good work. They hate that…
I thought maybe you were down to upgrade the system which left me wondering if anyone requested a Sort by last post at the bottom the way the old system worked (no nesting). It sure could make finding the last post easier when the thread gets long.
🙂
I had no idea Dan Goldin knew how to launch a DoS attack.
Are these types of attacks just a prelude of what we might see in ten years or so – denial of lunar access by other countries ?Once again a danger that is becoming more apparent.