FC: White House offline in apparent hacker attack; monitor app

I've created a monitoring program so we can watch, in near-real-time, as
the poor network admins at the White House scramble to bring the First
Homepage back online:
http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/

As you can tell, whitehouse.gov has been up and down more than the NASDAQ
(0 KB sizes mean the site was unreachable):
http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/data/www.whitehouse.gov

Though as recently as 7:09 pm ET, my 'bot did manage to grab a snapshot
(broken links are normal):
http://www.mccullagh.org/bin/whmon/snap/www.whitehouse.gov.5-22-2001.19-9-0

Stay tuned...

-Declan

---
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43993,00.html
    Woe Unto White House Site
    By Declan McCullagh (declan_at_wired.com)
    3:30 p.m. May 22, 2001 PDT
    WASHINGTON -- President Bush's recurring problems with the First
    Homepage just won't go away.
    Malicious hackers appear to be responsible for replacing the executive
    branch's official site with a near-empty black screen and references
    to a previous break-in, which dedicated visitors were able to glimpse
    during one of the brief periods whitehouse.gov was reachable on
    Tuesday.
    A White House spokesman said he could not provide details, but
    repeated attempts to connect showed the website was unreachable for at
    least five hours and was still offline as of 6:45 p.m. EDT.
    Around 3:45 p.m., a black page with three items -- two dead links to
    news articles and a link to a mirror of a previous hack -- showed up
    on the whitehouse.gov home page.
    The apparent intrusion, which comes during a time of heightened
    alertness because of threats from pro-China hackers, caps a four-month
    period during which the First Homepage has been savaged by critics
    calling it the state-of-the-rt -- five years ago. Occasional typos and
    sections that are still "coming soon" don't help.
    But even if his staff has to restore from tape backups, President Bush
    still plans to redesign and relaunch his homepage in the next month or
    so.
    [...]
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