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Amazing Pentagon Breach Happened Last Summer
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-03-10
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A vulnerability in Windows found itself at the end of accusatory fingers of blame over a June 2007 Pentagon hack that led to the theft of sensitive information from the nation's defense epicenter.
 | | Amazing Pentagon Breach Happened Last Summer |  |
Potential foes of America likely have their eager paws on data bearing significance to national defense. For that highly undesirable situation, we can thank the public servants at the Pentagon who fell for carefully crafted spam attacks.
GovernmentExecutive.com cited an account made by chief information officer Dennis Clem of the Office of the Secretary of Defense about last June's attack:
During the attack, spoofed e-mails containing recognizable names were sent to OSD employees. When they opened the messages, user IDs and passwords that unlocked the entire network were stolen; as a result, sensitive data housed on Defense systems was accessed, copied and sent back to the intruder.
"This was a very bad day," said Clem during a panel discussion at the Information Processing Interagency Conference Tuesday. The breach continues to pose a threat, he added. "We don't know when they'll use the information they stole, [which was] an amazing amount, [including] processes and procedures that will be valuable to adversaries."
Network infrastructure consolidation revealed malicious code inside a number of systems, "culminating in an intrusion that created havoc by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows," according to Clem.
We would like to think the Pentagon provides at least some cursory training to people about spam, malware, and the basic political fact that there are people in the world who hate America and would cheerfully gun down US citizens by the thousands, while only taking breaks to reload and cackle heartily.
We could be wrong in thinking the Pentagon does provide that instruction to its staffers. Perhaps Defense employees were preoccupied with the prospects of weekend getaways to Dewey Beach, and were distracted from recognizing the spam threat.
While Clem didn't mention any of the salient details about the Summer of 2007 attack, such as a place of origin, we do know where a similar attack against defense interests started in 2006.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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