Attack on Feds: It Came From Within

Computerworld - My security team was recently asked to help reduce costs by consolidating after-hours security and IT support services. We had been charging a nightly fee for round-the-clock on-call support, but the company reasons that it's cheaper to consolidate all first-line support to the on-call IT team that supports our applications.
I trained the on-call team, covering the most common problems and what to do if there's a situation they can't handle. My security team now offers second-line support.
The alerting system is well tuned, and we don't get many after-hours alarms, so I doubted we'd be called often. I was wrong.
At 3 a.m. on the first night the IT team took over, I received a call from a rather worried on-call guy who had been paged with an "ISS" alert. He didn't know that ISS just stands for Internet Security Systems Inc., the Atlanta-based vendor of our intrusion-detection software.
One of the many things we can detect is probes sent from ISS's Internet Scanner software. The scanner lets administrators check their networks for vulnerabilities, but attackers can also misuse it to map our networks and identify weaknesses. ISS tries to prevent this by using a complicated licensing process that limits the IP addresses each tool can attack. It also sends some special packets at the beginning of each scan, including the license key, the user name, and the host and domain of the scanning machine. That way, if someone uses the tool to scan a network they don't own, the product will announce who they are.
We monitor for these packets in case somebody finds a way, using network address translation perhaps, to trick the scanner into thinking it's probing a local machine when in fact it's scanning us.
More worrisome is that, as with other digital rights management systems, hackers claim to have broken ISS's license key system. In fact, key-generation software can be found on the Web to make keys for any network.
The fake license keys these tools generate typically have an ID of 1234. So even if the special packets contain the hacked ID, you have very little to go on. We could also expect the attacker's IP address to be faked.
The normal response to an ISS alert, we told the new support team, is to trace down the source of the attack via the America Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) Web site at www.arin.net and notify the attacker's Internet service provider. We even have standard forms for those submissions. We don't really expect