Military Snooping
July 3rd, 2004
I was a little freaked out this morning when I was checking my server stats and saw that the US military had been poking around on my site. There were several entries in the log leading to:
OrgName: The Defense Information Systems Agency
OrgID: DISA
Address: DISA/DSSO/JCLCC
Address: Room BF655A, The Pentagon
City: Washington
StateProv: DC
PostalCode: 20301
Country: US
NetRange: 198.25.0.0 - 198.26.255.255
CIDR: 198.25.0.0/16, 198.26.0.0/16
NetName: NETBLK-DISA-C
NetHandle: NET-198-25-0-0-1
Parent: NET-198-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: AAA-KELLY.NIPR.MIL
NameServer: AAA-VAIHINGEN.NIPR.MIL
NameServer: AAA-WHEELER.NIPR.MIL
NameServer: AAA-VIENNA.NIPR.MIL
Comment:
RegDate: 1992-12-05
Updated: 2004-01-13
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2004-07-02 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
At first I thought Why is the Pentagon reading my site? Who is DISA? What did I do? Am I going to jail?.... then I decided to stop freaking out and do a little more poking around.
The first thing I did was go look at DISA's site to see who they are. According to the about page
"The Defense Information Systems Agency is a combat support agency responsible for planning, engineering, acquiring, fielding, and supporting Global Net-Centric Solutions and operating the Defense Information System Network to serve the needs of the President, Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and the other DoD Components, under all conditions of peace and war."
Ok, that tells me just about nothing, so I decided to do a google search on the subject to see if anyone else had a similar experience. This turns up a bunch of other sites with the same type of visits I have. Many of those people blocking the nipr.mil addresses from their domain, but it doesn't seem smart to block the military from my site. Someone might get pissed and then really come get me.
The search continued and I finally found this page at notbored.org. Now things were starting to make sense. The NIPRNET is the unclassified DoD network "increasingly used by the DOD to allow its personnel to gain access the Internet", and if you notice the "NIPR.MIL" at the end of all of those name servers, you realize these visits are just a bunch of Government employees surfing the net and reading my site. They are actually some of the best readers I have, spending a great deal of time browsing many pages on the site. Freak out situation solved.
The only issue I have now is that many of these visits are happening in the middle of the day when these people should be working. NOW GO GET BACK TO WORK!
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Please don't block "MIL" servers! Keep in mind that a lot of us are civilians and we all get to eat and take breaks at different times, so even though you think we might be just wasting our day, government workers get breaks too!
cols.disa has hit me close to 300 times this month and I'm forbidden access to their site.
I'm pissed at the intrustion.