DNS Trouble Knocks NSA off Internet
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A server problem at the U.S. National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.
The nsa.gov Web site was unresponsive at 7 a.m. Pacific time Thursday and continued to be unavailable throughout the morning for Internet users.
The problem was resolved at around 11 a.m. Pacific time, according to Web site measurement company Netcraft.
The Web site was unreachable because of a problem with the NSA's DNS (Domain Name System) servers, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer with Arbor Networks. DNS servers are used to translate things like the Web addresses typed into machine-readable Internet Protocol addresses that computers use to find each other on the Internet.
The agency's two authoritative DNS servers were unreachable Thursday morning, McPherson said.
Because this DNS information is sometimes cached by Internet service providers, the NSA would still be temporarily reachable by some users, but unless the problem is fixed, NSA servers will be knocked completely off-line. That means that e-mail sent to the agency will not be delivered, and in some cases, e-mail being sent by the NSA would not get through.
What chance does the rest of has?
From the article:
The NSA is responsible for analysis of foreign communications, but it is also charged with helping protect the U.S. government against cyber attacks, so the outage is an embarrassment for the agency.
If the NSA is unable to configure and maintain their DNS servers what's the likelihood that everybody else are configuring DNS servers correctly.
I guess all my phone and web surfing's will now be monitored by the government, Oh the joys of freedom. LOL
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