HAcker Attacks in Cyberspace

As NATO troops, combat aircraft, and warships were preparing to attack during the Yugoslavian Conflict, NATO's computers were being attacked on a second front. NATO was prepared for this cyber attack. For the past few years, the U.S. military has been engaged in a quiet but seemingly never-ending series of e-mail skirmishes against an unseen enemy. These cyber battles are helping the military develop the tools it needs to defend itself and are proving to be better than any training exercises.

For 78 days, from March to June 1999, the United States and its NATO allies engaged in a military operation to bring an end to Serbian atrocities in Kosovo. This operation was known as Operation Allied Force. Three days after the bombing began hackers from an unknown location began an attack to disrupt the e-mail communication of the NATO allied forces. "Pings" or a method of hacking was the most widely used method to disrupt the communications of NATO. In this method one computer repeatedly calls another computer and delivers a large volume of messages that are meant to overload a system. These "e-mail bombs" caused only a few hours of disconnected service.

While the actual identities of these hackers

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Seventy thousand mail bombs were sent on the third day. Within forty-eight hours hacker sites were reporting of lapse in sent mail using of ACC as a relay point.

Airman Chris Soubeih was noticing an increase in the amount of e-mail being sent through the server at Langley.

The investigation yielded the following information. Cyber warfare skills are being honed by these cyber attacks. are unknown, a likely suspect was a Belgrade based five-member hacker team called Crna Ruka, which means Black Hand. By disrupting communication, hackers could have stopped NATO forces but they failed. Hackers can access almost any server from anywhere in the world and use that to disguise their locations. He had to develop a program which would let legitimate e-mail in but keep other e-mail out. This program would put suspect mail into a queue to be examined. It was a short-lived victory, however a newer and faster Pentium system was installed. Hackers immediate response was all out war. Turner then rewrote his program which has come to be known as "Bombshelter". As Andy Rooney once said "Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.

Approximate Word count = 1013
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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