US Prepares for Eventual Cyberwar - The New York Times is reporting on preparations in the works by the US government to prep for a 'cyberwar'. Precautionary measures are being taken to guard against concerted attacks by politically-minded (or well-paid) hackers looking to cause havoc. Though they outline scenarios where mass damage is the desired outcome (such as remotely opening a dam's gates to flood cities), most expect such conflicts to be more subtle. Parts of the internet, for example, may be unreachable or unreliable for certain countries. Regardless, the article suggests we've already seen our first low-level cyberwar in Estonia: "The cyberattacks in Estonia were apparently sparked by tensions over the country's plan to remove Soviet-era war memorials. Estonian officials initially blamed Russia for the attacks, suggesting that its state-run computer networks blocked online access to banks and government offices. The Kremlin denied the accusations. And Estonian officials ultimately accepted the idea that perhaps this attack was the work of tech-savvy activists, or 'hactivists,' who have been mounting similar attacks against just about everyone for several years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
[Slasdot]

BlockHosts 2.0.5 (Default branch) - BlockHosts is a script to record how many times a
local system is attacked, based on configurable
scanning of system logs for sshd or other
services. When a particular IP address exceeds a
configured number of failed login attempts, that
IP address is blocked using hosts.allow files, or
by using null-routing, or by using packet
filtering. An email notification facility is also
available.
License: Public Domain
Changes:
This release updates the vsftpd rule and adds an --enable-patterns option to enable specific rules at run-time. Email notification is now sent on both adds and deletes of host IP addresses, and the source distribution includes the test routines.
[FreshMeat]