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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