Tag Archives: Cyberwar

cloud computing, Cyberdefense and Information Assurance, tech

Amazon’s EC2 outage may be related to cyber-attack

At the moment, I’m waiting for some sort of confirmation. But this is what I know:

Since Monday, Change.org — a site that hosts petitions and other social action efforts for others–has been the subject of a DDOS attack from China, according to Ben Rattray,  Change.org‘s founder.  They’ve been working with their hosting company and with cyber experts to help screen out the attack as much as possible, but the site was down much of yesterday.  And it’s down today, intermittently.

Interesting fact: Change.org is hosted on Amazon Web Services.

Interesting fact: AWS’ Elastic Compute Cloud data center in Northern Virginia is experiencing an outage of various services, affecting Quora, HootSuite, and other social media companies hosted on it.  That would be the same site that Change.org is hosted at primarily, since the NoVA data center is the US East region cloud.

The Chinese have been varying their attack.  Is it possible they’ve exploited Amazon’s EC2 APIs to attack now?

I haven’t heard back from Amazon.

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Defense Department, tech

Rules of engagement for cyberwarfare (Defense Systems)

From my swan song at Defense Systems:

In the face of an increasingly dangerous collection of network-enabled terrorists, politically and economically motivated hackers, and potentially adversarial countries flexing their muscle in the cyber realm, the Defense Department is in the process of creating a doctrine for waging – and preventing – war in cyberspace.

Read more on Defense Systems.

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