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http://www.abcnews.com/sections/tech/CNET/cnet_navyhack980925.html
Navy fights new hack method
Tim Clark
CNET NEWS.COM
Hackers are banding together across the globe to mount low-visibility
attacks in an effort to sneak under the radar of security specialists and
intrusion detection software, a U.S. Navy network security team said
today.
Coordinated attacks from up to 15 different locations on several
continents have been detected, and Navy experts believe that the attackers
garner information by probing Navy Web sites and then share it among
themselves.
"These new patterns are really hard to decipher--you need expert forensics
to get the smoking gun," said Stephen Northcutt, head of the Shadow
intrusion detection team at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. "To know
what's really happening will require law enforcement to get hold of the
hackers' code so we can disassemble it."
The new method involves sending as few as two suspicious probes per hour
to a host computer, a level of interest that usually won't be detected by
standard countermeasures. But by pooling information learned from those
probes, hackers can garner considerable knowledge about a site.
-o-
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Received on Tue Oct 6 09:11:40 1998