Security experts have to admit they kind of admire him, the hacker who is bizarrely attacking every last boring part of the U.S. government, online. His mysterious army is living the American Dream, really.

The ongoing denial of service attack against U.S. government websites is nothing if not ambitious, you see, and what it lacks in sophistication it makes up for with what an Yank might call "moxie."

According to reports from IDG and AP, someone is launching what may be the biggest distributed Web attack yet, consuming at one point 20-40 gigbytes/second worth of bandwidth. And instead of just concentrating that power, the attacker is going after basically everything, including

  • the Secret Service,
  • the Department of Homeland Security,
  • the Department of State,
  • the White House,
  • the National Security Agency,
  • the Department of Defense,
  • the Federal Trade Commission,
  • the Department of Transportation,
  • the Treasury Department,
  • the Federal Aviation Administration
  • and, who knows, probably the Park Service too.

As one researcher told ComputerWorld,

Who goes around targeting a site like the FAA or the U.S. Treasury? It's not something that most people would think to attack.

Ah, but every American success story must start somewhere. Using computers mainly based in Korea, but not necessarily controlled from there, the attacker successfully knocked out the FTC website for a day or two. Just imagine what our country would look like if our financial regulators were out to lunch much longer than that!

(Pic via)