General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Right wing cyber attacks on Healthcare.gov website confirmed [View all]jtuck004
(15,882 posts)year on military and government sites across the country and around the world, because there is a network in front of them that prevents it. You would be correct if they had hosted this in someone's garage connected to their cable network, but I bet it's just like all the other serious networks in Federal facilities, which sit behind hardware and software run by rooms of people across the nation and around the world which protect them.
Malicious packets are routed away and dropped, and the sites go on. Else all the sites run by the government would be down on a continual basis. Perfect, no, but the crap in that article is nothing but shiny stuff to dangle in front of people who don't know better. Like getting one's news from the tabloid section of the supermarket.
You are correct about the log files, but those are not at the server, they are at switches and routers and in programs removed (logically) from the sites, behind doors protected by a lot of security. You must have higher clearance than most people to even get in the rooms. And the traffic must go through their control to get anywhere on a government computer behind that network.
Attacks on government computers are constant, 365 days a year, much of it international. If there wasn't security and an infrastructure to handle this the entire government would be unable to operate, whether military or civilian. And those log files you talk about show exactly that.
In our own private world we were dealing with DOS attacks back in the 90's, so this really isn't anything new. And the people being described in that article don't have enough sophistication to have done even those attacks, much less get through today's security.