A cautionary tale...

[richard@auscoms.com.au]

Linkers:

I've deleted a signature from this, to be fair to a friend. It appears that a
piece of fake news (attached to the top of the recent inf-war report to the
government) is taking on a life of its own as fact. At least, it's getting
passed around the 'net as fact.

Points:
1) Authors, beware of making jokes. In this case, the disclaimer (that the news
is fake) is buried in a footnote a long way into the report. People aren't
reading that far down!

2) Have other Linkers encountered this one?

Richard Chirgwin

> This may be crap, but I got it off a government website.  URL is
http://www.aph.gov.au/dpl/pubs/rp/1997-98/98rp18.htm

> [signature]
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
> Hackers Attack NZ & Aust for Joining Gulf Taskforce
> 
> AZP London: A hacker group calling themselves the 'Anti-Christ Doom Squad'
> was involved in attacks against New Zealand and Australia just days after
> Wellington and Canberra announced troop deployments to the latest Gulf
> Crisis.
> 
> In a secret UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) report leaked
> today, the Auckland blackouts that crippled the city for weeks earlier in
> the year, were traced to electronic attacks on New Zealand's electricity
> distribution network, launched by computers in Amsterdam over the
> Internet. A senior government source in the Australian equivalent to GCHQ,
> the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), confirmed that the widespread
> blackouts across the Australian state of Queensland were also traced to
> the same source.
> 
> The 'Anti-Christ' hackers traversed computer systems worldwide using
> 'spoofed' user-names and stolen passwords to try to conceal their
> identity. Once inside the New Zealand power companies' supercomputer, the
> hackers accessed a control system commonly used in energy distributions
> systems to launch their attack.  The Supervisory Control and Data
> Acquisition (SCADA) system controls switches and flows across most modern
> power distribution networks.
> 
> The 'Anti Christ Doom Squad' then concentrated on manipulating one key
> choke-point on the outskirts of Auckland. It was the location where all
> five main powerlines converged before entering the city. The 'Doom Squad'
> altered the temperature within the gas-encased power lines thereby
> crippling them within minutes. The whole operation was launched and
> conducted from a drug café in Amsterdam using a lap-top and a modem.
> 
> Simultaneous widespread blackouts across the Australian state of
> Queensland disrupted businesses, schools and emergency services. However,
> the DSD refused to comment on whether any other critical Australian
> infrastructures were affected.
> 
> Because the attacks passed through computers in over 10 countries and
> legal jurisdictions, it will be almost impossible to bring the hackers to
> justice, the GCHQ report notes.
> 
> The government of Iraq denies any connection with the blackouts.
>