Russian hackers infiltrated into Pentagon
Computer hackers suspected of working from Russia successfully penetrated Pentagon computer systems in one of the most severe cyber attacks on US military networks. The electronic attack was so serious that Adm Michael Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, briefed President George W Bush and Robert Gates, the defence secretary. Defence officials told the Los Angeles Times that the attack struck computers within the US Central Command, which oversees Iraq and Afghanistan, and involved malicious software – known as “malware” – that permeates a network. “This one was significant, this one got our attention,” said an official, speaking anonymously.
Officials did not disclose the extent of the damage and would not elaborate on the reasons for believing the assault originated in Russia. The Pentagon and other US government departments face repeated cyber attacks, especially from Russia and China, either from individuals or indirectly from those countries’ governments. Within the past 18 months Russia has been accused of orchestrating major electronic attacks on neighbours Estonia and Georgia.
Source: Telegraph
Comments(58)
Thats what they get for using Norton.
Well done, russian hackers…
Wouldn’t it be easier to put all of the computers who contain important information on a closed LAN? If someone would need anything from them, just log on to one. No internet access and closed LAN = security.
Geez..they need to work more on stronger protection..Pentagon for crying out loud and they hacked into the US pentagon like a high school computer geek hacks into school computers.. lol
was probably just one of many number of russian spambots that are currently running on tens of thousands of machines…
Well, guess one day those missiles get launched by a worm…One worm = xxxxxxx missiles, who to blame? The worm or the owner of missiles?
They should have downloaded zone alarm for free!
@9 BOO5Ter is free for home usage not corporate
.They should get comodo instead 
). Lol
lol serves em right americans are self righteous aholes say for a few, there all high and mighty but they forget the are only americans co’s britan didnt want em as they come from our prisoners that we shipped off there ^^
@1 lol
There are many valuable documents about 9/11 in the Pentagon (and Iraq,…). Can’t they just copy that and publish it to the world. Then we can prove 9/11 was an inside job for a war for oil and the profitable military industry needed for that war.
@11 Grim
That would be Australia you are talking about, the people who went to America went there of their own free will. What sort of school did you go to?
did they information on area 51 or aliens ?
Hackers didn’t hack the DoD network, a usb (thumb drive) transferred worm infected computers within the DoD. The question was whether it was deliberate or not. In addition the worm (agent.btz) was designed to download a virus onto the computer in the form of an image (.jpg) which is then renamed and registered as a system .DLL and works as spyware and gives the ability to upload further files to create a bot net.
Its highly unlikely this was a directed attack against the DoD since the virus has been in existence since around July attacking corporate networks at random and in the wild.
Also the DoD was using McAfee which due to a slow response to this particular virus and its many variations didn’t pick up on the virus until the 16th of November (go figure).
Uhh, briefed President Bush? How old is this news?
Wouldn’t it be easier to put all of the computers who contain important information on a closed LAN?
It is, or is heavily encrypted, just like any major business or government information. But there is still a massive amount of gray area or white information like personnel files, payroll, ect.
And so the the war begins!
Bring out the armored dolphins and apocalypse tanks!
Seriously though, when did this happen?…
@17 15 November – since then all USB drives have been disabled on all DoD computers.
@16 all classified data is on closed networks, inaccessible to the outside world. the only computers compromised were computers used only for office purposes (eg email, internet, word, powerpoint, etc..).
@15 What are you smoking? He is still the president until next year.
he is still the president till next year
bet it’s just a 16 years old living inside the US itself.
KGB’s reborn xD
i bet that article was written by a Russian, full of spelling errors.
@Lucias
You seem to know alot, any links to your information source?
—
This makes me think that a PS3 is more secure than the pentagon
sounds like another variant of the 067 exploit, which is kinda funny. they dont patch ?
Man a lot of stupid people at the pentagon these days! They should upgrade to Vista64!
Its more secure! Also UAC can help stupid people!
pic.JPG.exe by any chance?- LOL
People never learn! Never activate autorun and never hide the extensions for the known files!
@18
Finally someone who understands. When they say people managed to hack DoD computers they don’t mean they gained access to Top Secret information. Most DoD information is set into 3 categories. Classified, Secret and Top Secret. All Top secret information is stored on secure networks only accessible to computers with Top Secret intranet access. So basically the only way to hack Top Secret files is to gain access to a Top Secret computer…Yea good luck with that.
Jack Bauer could get to those Top Secret files.
We can still get those top secret files but I will need an Acme rocket and a large rubber band; I already have the skates. Any Russians willing to donate?
@11
what?
LOL @1
That’s one of the best jokes I ever seen.
“That’s what they get by using Norton”
Like Norton is one the worst antivirus in the market. Apart from Panda!
Personally, I don’t believe there was any “hacker” attack. As soon as the “attack” occured, they tightened restrictions in the Pentagon to restrict employees from bringing in an array of media formats (flash drives, cd/dvds, ect were all prohibited). I believe this was because the infection was an internal problem (some secretary or IT guy downloading something they shouldnt have), and is simply being blown out of proportion to encourage military action against Russia (as the Republican party has been trying to do).
I mean they did just lose an election..
@ 24
You’re a genius.
@9 That was Australia u twat !
They run out uk !
@MasterChief
I am constantly amazed by two wondrous and utterly predictable events. When something happens, the biggest noise will be generated by bystanders who know little or nothing about the events or the circumstances; and if it involves computers; every Gates-hating, Windows-hating; Linux-loving geek idiot will line up to declare Linux the ultimate solution for all of the world’s problems. For those of you who don’t have a clue as to what is happening but feel qualified to comment on it anyway; autorun has been disabled as a matter of policy on army domain-connected systems for a long time. USB devices with memory capabilities HAVE been blocked and USB keyboards and mice are working just fine. Send me the name and address of the criminal transferring data between SIPR and NIPR connections and I’ll make sure his commander gets a personal call from the Army G6 stipulating the new recommended punishments for information assurance policy violations. The most significant cause of the government’s IA problems is a crowd of thousands of “IA Certified” civilians at high levels of command who even with all their fancy certifications and alleged experience never saw this coming or actually suspected problems in the works and didn’t have the moral or ethical courage to rock the boat by bringing it to someone’s attention. Solutions for this problem have been available for years and I suspect the military services will end up spending infinitely more taxpayer money fixing the problem than it would ever have cost to buy preventive hardware and software to begin with. I assure everyone that if Linux was more prevalent than it is; it would be the most hacked OS in the universe. Just because it isn’t under constant assault by hackers doesn’t mean it is safe. That just means at the present time hackers don’t think it is even worth targeting because there is so little of it. I heard the same Linux arguments starting in 1999 with the same heated enthusiasm when Government web sites were hacked. Looking around, I don’t see any more Linux today than I did then. IT specialists on the ground have seen these problems stacking up for three or four years and all the warnings from the ground were ignored by the “Certified” experts who fly too high to ever understand what really goes on at ground level. I have friends in Army IT working on the ground to tackle the external media challenge and they are very likely to win this one. Someone finally concluded it is more important to keep Chinese spies out of military computers than for soldiers to carry music around on thumb drives to play on their government systems. And yes; use of personally owned software and hardware on government systems has been PROHIBITED by Army Regulation for many years. The biggest problem is that they didn’t punish soldiers or government civilians caught violating the policy. I understand that is about to change.
there are countries where talented ppl have nothing else to do but to destroy. Russia and China are only few of those. In normal countries you are getting paid for being a programmer so childish anarchy is left aside.
With all due respect to Russian hackers but there are 4 websites in Georgia from which 3 do not pass a simple SQL injection of 1+1 while fourth has moving Matrix background viva la 90′th style.
congraz.
@DISA
Yep!
…..guess GI JOE wont be able to waste our tax dollars listening to Pantera anymore..
…on another note, I suppose this will have an effect on soldier-submitted video’s to liveleak, etc. Maybe not, because I know some of them use cyber cafe’s and their own laptops. But I imagine if its connected to any military connection/network, the same “new” rules will apply.
Perhaps the trillions of dollars missing that Congresswoman McKinney was talking about should have been used to preventing sh!t like this from happening. Ooops….. they said it was! lol Just watch the clip.
McKinney Grills Rumsfeld
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eootfzAhAoU
Its DEFENSE you dimwits
show how or computer skills are
Just stop downloading pron with the Pentagon’s computers… sheesh
Yet they can’t hack obama’s system:)
Gotta use linux! windows worms dont run on linux, stupid ppl!
Those government wankers should’ve known porn sites spread a lot of worms and viruses…
wow the part about estonia and georgia was unnesecary
estonia honors nazi leaders(no joke)
and georgie… wel… they braught war on themselves when the atackd the oessetian province in order to regain millitary power there at the time there were russian peac troops stationed there (im from georgia btw lol)
@TheGrimReefer
stop reading long essays everyone else posted TheGrimReefer @32 knows what he is talking about the rest is b.s
big deal.
matthew broderick pulled this off in the eighties before the internets even existed.
The sad truth. These are the only KNOWN hacks. What about the other ones that they do not know about?
And using Cisco products who outsource their chip manufacturing to China and other foreign countries?
America – My how the (perceived) mighty have fallen.
I won’t get into writing a full page about this.
Just go here to read about it:
http://cyberwarfaremag.wordpress.com/
this is ridiculous no one was hack it was a worm! a big fuss is being made so as to enable the complete disablement of USB storage devices. there were no russians, or any other type of hacker. and norton wasnt being used…mcafee was. any questions? it amazes me at the stupidity of people commenting after they read a few paragraphs on a torrent site.
@24 there are several news sites reporting including the armys own early bird news service which better detail the problem. try the starsandstripes.com or armytimes.com they had full page spreads. my info comes from the last two weeks of dealiing with the falllout of the worm in the government IT world. LOTS of overtime going on here to accomplish massive forensics scans on infected computers that simply tell us the worm was transfered by a USB device. well that and ensuring by hand or through mcafee’s enterprise console that all computers have been updated past a DAT that can detect agent.btz
@17
LOl!
Well done!!
@13 – LoL
Exactly what I thought when I read the headlines
Pentagon, CIA, FBI… etc. if they are well known; people WILL attack it, it is a fact of life.
Same goes for Microsoft Windows, 70% of the population in the world use it (that is a lot of pissed off people when a virus strikes).
Can you imagine hackers reeking havoc on MAC OS or Linux. NO ONE WILL NOTICE SUCH THINGS!!!!
damn:-) i think using KAV or KIS is not a bad idea after all …..
they should of used macs…
Yeah, Chuck Norris hacked top secrets. Gimme a break.