A week ago, we closed with a St. Patrick's Day cliffhanger, as the U.S. Army prepared itself for an announced hack attack by a Brazilian faction of cyber-vandals calling themselves the "Crime-Boy's." For those of you who need to catch up, here's the Soap Opera Digest version: last year, the Army's web site was hacked, so the folks in charge replaced their notoriously leaky Windows NT web server with a much more secure Mac running WebSTAR. All seemed well, until early last week, when the "Crime-Boy's" managed to alter a couple Army web sites-- however, the sites they vandalized were lesser pages still running on other NT servers; the home page hosted on the Mac held strong. And that's when the threat came in: the "Crime-Boy's" vowed to hack the main Army site on St. Patrick's Day.

So the Army took some precautions. They called for Eric Zelenka, a member of StarNine's WebSTAR team, who flew in to make sure that the Army's Mac was configured properly. The only change he made to the system involved "increasing the Data Cache allocations"; otherwise, everything was ship-shape. So Friday came, and the world held its breath. The AtAT staff periodically checked the Army home page during the "window of attack," and it continued to function normally throughout the day. In fact, the news articles on the main page were even updated a couple of times, proving that the Army webmasters carried on with their normal daily tasks, as the "Crime-Boy's" failed to penetrate the Mac's defenses.

So hooray for the Mac, and three cheers for WebSTAR! Needless to say, StarNine (and its new parent company, ACI) are trumpeting this victory for all it's worth. On Thursday they issued a press release, "WebSTAR Secure Where Others Fail," which details the repelled attack and links to a few news stories that covered the (non-)event. But the price of security is eternal vigilance, and ACI knows that; "It is gratifying to know that WebSTAR has been able to withstand this attack on the U.S. Army site, but we also know there are hackers out there who will see WebSTAR as a challenge. That is why we are committed to maintaining the most secure server product possible to protect against future attacks." Amen.