The Pentagon has experienced an unprecedented cyber attack that may have compromised national security.
Fox New reports the following:
The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD's, FOX News has learned.
Read the whole Fox News story here.
6 comments:
The Fox story is overblown. Though I don't agree with the bent of Wired's Danger Room, the do provide better information about this situation than Fox. They have two stories on this, the first dated the 19th of Nov., titled
"Under Worm Assault, Military Bans Disks, USB Drives" and the second dated 20 Nov. titled "Military USB Ban Meant to Stop 'Adversary Attacks'"
As a retired AF/ANG (11 years active duty and 9 years traditional Guardsman, respectively) I worked three different career fields, the last being Communications and Computer Operations. From that perspective I can say that this is not as serious as what has been on-going since about 1996 with respect to China and certain Eastern European countries. DOD and all its entities have been under constant cyber attack, and it never lets up.
With respect to the article filed by Fox (Faux?) this move by DOD should have been unnecessary as "memory sticks," "thumb drives," and other USB devices should have never been allowed on DOD computers unless they were thoroughly tested for robustness and security, and strictly accounted for. Certain DOD elements (i.e., Army) were allowing individuals to use their own personal, open market purchased USB drives on DOD computers to tranfer information that, although unclassified, was OPSEC and/or FOUO operations sensitive. This is/was totally irresponsible, and it (predictably) resulted in an infection by a worm called "Agent.btz" that propagates itself through removable storage devices, particularly those that use the Universal Serial Bus to connect to the host machine.
The virulence of this particular worm is solely due to the ease of use of USB drives and the fact that "in-theater" computer systems are frequently not network connected. Thus, users employ removable media to transfer data from one computer to the next. Simple controls and scanning of all removable media when it connected to a new host machine would end the infection, and prevent a new infection from ever taking hold.
The blame for this one actually lies on the DOD's version of IT, and their failure to adequately foresee potential threats and take proper preventative measures. It should have been a "duh" thing for them to properly restrict portable storage media, and its usage on DOD computers and computer systems.
Thanks for the heads-up, Paul. But I am not so sure the threat is overblown, although this particular incident may have been.
I was reading an article just yesterday about the ChiComs launching major offensives in the realm of cyber-attacks.
I would hope we are prepared to thwart such attempts to gain access to our sensitive info, although some claim the ChiComs already have it.
Lloyd-Morgan,
It is not the issue of cyber-attack that is overblown. That issue is one that recent administrations have not taken seriously, and have not considered it an open, overt act of war. (which they should)
My reference to overblown pertains to the Fox News story and the way it was presented. They presented it as some recent, urgent, utterly dangerous thing, to wit:
"The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD's, FOX News has learned."
This "yellow journalism" at its best. The real story about the worm infection is not quite so alarming, and does not need to be presented in this fashion. What Fox could have done is used the issue to highlight the fact that all computers are vulnerable to this kind of threat. They could have also brought out the fact that some of America's supposed "friends" are the primary sources of malware, phishing frauds, scams, pirated software, DDOS attacks, and the on-going attempts to penetrate National Security networks and steal or corrupt the data contained on them.
True enough...
"I would hope we are prepared to thwart such attempts to gain access to our sensitive info, although some claim the ChiComs already have it."-d.
Why would we worry about such security attempts to thwart such attempts when Presidents such as Clinton sell the information to them. Now we have Clinton Heavy preparing to assume the office, he may just give it to them.
Should I have capitalized "he"? After all, many are treating him as a god?
SA, I'm worried about it now just like I was worried about it when Bill Clinton sold our secrets to the ChiComs.
By the way, Clinton Heavy is Hillary. ROFL!! As for Obama, he is simply, 'The Chairman.'
You know Chairman Mao was worshipped like a god in China...
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