Ed Bott

A very popular blog I read regularly reports that it has come under sustained attack this week by comment spammers. Nothing unusual there — I delete a dozen or more comments every week, and many, many more get shunted away by a spam-blocking program that runs on my Web server.

What’s alarming about this report, though, is the detail that the attacks have been launched from computers in the .mil domain. For those who aren’t up on their Internet architecture, those are PCs that belong to the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, not to mention the Army Corps of Engineers and special offices in the Pentagon. Comments (of the non-spam variety) in the thread that first reported this suggest that this problem is happening to other people as well.

So, if these reports are to be believed, we have two possibilities:

1. A group of computers in the United States military have been compromised by viruses, Trojan horses, and/or hackers. What other types of damage could a compromised machine inside a .mil network do?
2. An arm of the United States military is actively targeting specific Web sites with attacks. I don’t have nearly enough tinfoil to make the hat I’d need to wear to believe this one.

But if the first case is true, it sounds like someone in the Government needs to get serious about security. Soon.