Hacker Breaks into White House Website
Source: kcbs
Publication date: 2001-05-04

(KCBS) – The White House website has fallen victim to a hack attack. KCBS Computer Industry Analyst Larry Magid says the web hack is called a denial of service attack.

”A denial of service attack is when someone inundates a website with millions of requests.” Magid said. “It’s much like a demonstration. If you stand out in front of a government building, and enough people are standing there,” no one can get through to go into the building.

Magid said, in this case, “so many requests went into the web server that people who were trying to get there simply to look at whitehouse.gov weren’t able to do so.”

Magid said “this is exactly the same technique that brought down Yahoo and CNN.”

This is the first successful attack on the White House website.

Magid said this is a very popular site.

The FBI is investigating the incident, but Magid said it is not always successful in apprehending the person or person’s responsible for these hack attacks.

They “could be anywhere in the world,” Magid said, “and they could actually spoof innocent people into carrying out their attack. If you’re a clever enough hacker, you can program somebody else’s computer to carry out the attack for you."

The incident has now been brought under control, and the site is again accessible.

-- Anonymous, May 04, 2001