Pentagon email system hacked
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The Pentagon says a non-classified email system was hacked causing "administrative" disruption....
In what can only be a moment of heightened embarrassment, the US Pentagon admitted on Thursday that it had to take up to 1,500 internal email accounts offline following the penetration of one of its email systems by a hacker.
According to Pentagon officials the email system did not contain any classified information relating to military operations. The move to take the accounts offline was one of several “precautionary measures” undertaken following the detection of the intrusion, said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
The Pentagon has remained tightlipped about the nature and scope of the attack which it says has merely caused some “administrative” disruption.
Like most government systems, the Pentagon rebuffs hundreds of attempted cyber attacks on a daily basis. These can often take the form of probes, designed to test the robustness of a particular system. Such attacks are perpetrated by a range of parties, including so-called hobbyists or recreational hackers, politicised groups or ‘hacktivists’, terrorists, and nation-states.
News of the Pentagon breach follows the somewhat ironic revelation in early June that the US Homeland Security Department, the chief US agency for combating cyber threats, suffered in excess of 800 hacks, virus outbreaks, and other security related problems during the past two years. On one occasion spyware was found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems, senior officials acknowledged to Congress.
Such events underline the vulnerability of both government and corporate IT systems to cyber attacks, which are becoming an increasingly prevalent means by which to wage information warfare and espionage. This issue was starkly underlined in early May, when Baltic state Estonia suffered a sustained, three-week long cyber assault against its state and privately-owned IT networks.
Estonia blamed the Russian government for the attacks, which followed a dispute over the location of a Red Army war memorial. But recent research from two security companies suggest the attacks were perpetrated by a loosely federated group of global activists.
The incident, first reported in the UK press by Information Age, prompted the European Commission to table a paper on the growing threat of cyber assaults to European government and commerce.
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