Hacker probe widens as Canada attacked

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-- Dee (T1Colt556@aol.com), February 12, 2000

Answers

People warned us about free trade! (bg)

-- Steve Baxter (chicoqh@home.com), February 13, 2000.

Emails from pres of a Calgary ISP.

January 18, 2000

"... I am writing to apologize for ... system problems over the past 2 weeks. ... has been experiencing a number of system failures where part of ... Internet service may have been unavailable. Most of these failures have occurred in the evening and have affected dialup Internet customers. ... has suffered more outages in the past 2 weeks the we have had in the past 2 years.

These outages can be attributed to two sources : 1) Our aggressive system upgrade schedule to handle increased customer demand; and, 2) malicious attacks on our network from the Internet. ... (we have) been aggressively upgrading our network services to withstand recent attempts from Internet hackers. Our upgrades are designed to improve reliability of our system."

January 19, 2000

"First and foremost, ... was NOT "Hacked" into by perpetrators over the Internet. All your data has remained safe and sound under electronic lock and key. Your Email, credit cards and passwords were NOT accessed by unauthorized personnel. This has never been an issue about security.

"What Internet "Hackers" attempted to do was disrupt your Internet service via a "Denial of Service" attack. This means that someone on the Internet did something to try to overload or confuse our computers.

For example: let's say a stranger used a voice phone to call 100 people telling them to contact your personal home phone line immediately. Your home phone would receive 100 phone calls in an evening. This would overload your home phone and you would have likely unplugged it from the wall. Anyone trying to call you would have been unsuccessful.

Something very similar has been happening. Instead of using just 100 computers, "Hackers" deployed the resources of thousands computers on the Internet to overload our system. Thus causing it to unplug itself.

This type of "Denial of Service" attack is called "Smurfing". It happens all the time. If someone "Smurfed" the computer that authenticates your login name and password, you would not be able to dial in.

The computer that authenticates will stop responding. "Hackers" do NOT have your login name, they simply attack the computer that authenticates your login name.

We combat these types of "Smurf" attacks by deploying redundant backup computers. Should one computer fail, a second and third computer are ready to take over. So even in the event of a failure, the second computer kicks in under 15 seconds and you will not notice any service disruption.

In the rarest of cases, the backup systems do not kick in or get overloaded. Due to the large number of attacks we have experienced in the past 2 weeks, you may have noticed some downtime or outages on your end.

We were never "Hacked" into. All that is happening is "Hackers" are attempting to disrupt the Internet services that make up our Internet. Everytime these "Hackers" find a way to "Smurf" a service, our team finds a way to ensure it never happens."

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), February 13, 2000.