Re: 0wned .gov machines (was Re: Russian cyberwar against Estonia?)

[Paul Hoffman]

At 6:34 PM +0000 5/20/07, John Levine wrote:
 >I've heard nothing formal, but my strong understanding is a lot of US
government machines, at least if we're talking workstations on
non-classified nets, are in fact "0wn3d" at this point.

Well, here's an anecdote: at last year's CEAS conference, Rob Thomas
of Team Cymru gave the keynote on the underground economy, with a most
horrifying set of both live demos and selected snapshots of the online
bazaars where online warez are traded, everything from zombie farms to
spamware to stolen credit cards.  One of the more amusing was a guy
who offered a zombie in some part of the government that you'd hope
would be moderately secure, NASA or someplace like that, at a higher
than normal price.  The immediate response was ridicule, bots on
government nets are a dime a dozen, and aren't worth any more than any
other bot.

Oh, goodie. I get to the same source to show the opposite. At Rob's 
talk at the AOTA summit, he talked about someone offering some botted 
machines in a particular US government subnet at a normal prices and 
someone quickly over-bid by a suspiciously high amount. The 
assumption is that it was for the possible data on those machines.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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