http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politics/story/14931.html
Pentagon Deflects Web Assault
by Niall McKay
9:55am 10.Sep.98.PDT
The Pentagon struck back against Internet activists who attempted to hold
an "online sit-in" Wednesday at the Defense Department's main Web site.
The attack, which attempted to overwhelm the Web servers, also targeted
sites for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the president of Mexico.
"Our support personnel were aware of this planned electronic civil
disobedience attack and were able to take appropriate countermeasures,"
said Defense Department spokeswoman Suzan Hansen.
The group of Internet activists, who call themselves Electronic
Disturbance Theater, support the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, fighting
against the Mexican government. To draw attention to this cause, they
attempted to temporarily disable certain Web sites by asking demonstrators
to load a hostile Web-based program called FloodNet.
But the Pentagon said that the FloodNet attack -- which attempts to
overwhelm Web servers by requesting multiple pages simultaneously --
didn't get far. The Defense Department hinted that electronic
countermeasures fended off the protesters.
"Measures were taken to send the countless demands [from the attacker's
servers] into the great beyond," Hansen said.
Participants in the FloodNet protest needed only to load the FloodNet Web
page. The page contained a Java applet configured to request and load the
three target Web sites every three seconds. The Electronic Disturbance
Theater estimated that up to 10,000 people took part in the demonstration,
delivering 600,000 hits to each of the three Web sites per minute.
The automated rapid-fire requests are designed to overwhelm the target Web
sites so they cannot be viewed by their intended audience, known as a
"denial of service" attack.
The Pentagon's Web-site support team apparently struck back with a Java
applet of its own. That applet sensed requests from the FloodNet servers,
and loaded -- and reloaded -- an empty browser window on the attacker's
desktop. The move forced the protesters to reboot their computers.
The Electronic Disturbance Theater declared the protest a success.
"Our interest is to help the people of Chiapas to keep receiving the
international recognition that they need to keep them alive," said Brett
Stalbaum, a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater and author of the
FloodNet software.
The group described its action as electronic civil disobedience -- a
relatively new phenomena, according to a lecturer with the Department of
Economics at University of Texas at Austin.
"In a lot of ways it is simply the modern version of the tradition of
civil disobedience," Harry Cleaver said "But there are a lot of problems
associated with it. For instance, should US protesters have the right to
protest on a foreign government's Web site?"
For Stalbaum, the answer is yes.
"We protested the Mexican president's site for an obvious reason," he
said. "We protested the Pentagon site because we believe that the US
military trained the soldiers carrying out the human rights abuses at the
School of the Americas."
However the action at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange was a symbolic protest
against globalization, which is at the root of the Chiapas' problems,
according to Stalbaum.
Officials at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange were aware of the protest but
believed that it had not affected their services. "We get about 6 million
hits a day," said a spokesman. "We were not aware of any reduction in
services today."
The action was funded by a US$4,500 grant from TKTKTTmark, (pronounced
"artmark") an activist group dedicated to anti-corporate activism by
channeling funds from donors to workers.
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Received on Thu Sep 10 17:01:51 1998