Latest FBI Flub Takes Its Own Network Offline Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit [Here's another example of why they're called Famous But Incompetent. The FBI's major flub this week took their entire network offline. They even shut down their own "high-tech crime unit," the NIPC -- those are the guys who are supposed to fight "cyber-terrorism" and who sent out last week's comedy alert about an "attack on the American [sic] internet." The "attack" never materialized, and was apparently based on a cyberchat that was intercepted in Europe of some script-kiddies who were merely fantasizing online. With all the unemployment in the high-tech world since the dot.com bubble went bust, it's astonishing that the FBI can't even manage to hire the personnel to provide the skilled services they lack. Perhaps the competent people the FBI needs so badly would be too embarrassed to work for Famous But Incompetent. Welcome to Homeland Security... duuuh.] ZDNet - Augst 13, 2002 http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-949564.html FBI's Web sites plunge into darkness By Declan McCullagh Special to ZDNet News WASHINGTON--The FBI accidentally pulled the plug on its own Web sites Tuesday morning. A misconfiguration in the bureau's domain name setup meant that many visitors to FBI.gov could not get through. As of 11 am PT, the FBI's configuration problem had been fixed. The apparent error also wiped out the online presence of the FBI's high-tech crime unit, the National Infrastructure Protection Center, at NIPC.gov. An FBI spokesman said Tuesday that the glitch was accidental and was not the result of a malicious attack. "The server is down," spokesman Paul Moskal said. "It's an internal issue here. That's the good news as opposed to some attack or something." Early Tuesday morning, the FBI's domain name servers started sending empty replies when visitors tried to reach the site. Some Internet service providers kept a temporary copy of the correct information, meaning that FBI.gov and NIPC.gov were occasionally reachable. The FBI receives its Internet connectivity through Akamai, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company with about 13,000 servers that store data on behalf of clients. "This has nothing to do with the services that Akamai provides FBI.gov," said Jeff Young, a spokesman for Akamai. "We obviously are continuing to support them however we can." FBI.gov is an alias for FBI.edgesuite.net, which continued to operate normally. Edgesuite is an Akamai product marketed for e-government use. Jon Lasser, a Baltimore-area system administrator and author of Think Unix, said the FBI's mistake was likely "some sort of server misconfiguration. Their host stopped returning the addresses of their Web servers. That's not good." Easily recognizable names like FBI.gov are translated into numeric addresses through the Domain Name System (DNS). Microsoft made a similar DNS blunder in January 2001 that knocked out its Web sites for a full day. An embarrassing series of problems centering on a collection of routers in Canyon Park, Wash., took out dozens of Microsoft properties including Hotmail.com, MSN.com, Microsoft.com, and MSNBC.com. Moskal blamed the bureau's woes on "an internal crash that we all experience occasionally." ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytjus-08.14.02-12:58:01-8925