Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Pentagon Hit by Unprecedented Cyber Attack
FoxNews ^ | 11/20/08

Posted on 11/20/2008 4:43:58 PM PST by Sammy67

Edited on 11/20/2008 4:48:23 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]

Thursday, November 20, 2008 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.

The attack came in the form of a global virus or worm that is spreading rapidly throughout a number of military networks.


(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...


TOPICS: Breaking News; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: china; coldwar2; communists; computers; crime; cyberattack; cybersecurity; defensedepartment; dod; homelandsecurity; internet; iran; military; nationalsecurity; news; pentagon; russia; sovietunion; spyware; trojan; unitedstates; virus; war; web; worm; wot
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 181-200201-220221-240241-245 next last
To: LibertyRocks

Liberty:

I think you’re right. The world is very much in an appeasement phase, what with Iran’s announcement of having enough enriched uranium. Will anyone fight? The world has entered a global recession, an evil menace is arising, and the world is inclined toward appeasement and peace. Sounds like the early 1903s. Except this time instead of Roosevelt, a man willing to fight, we have an empty suit who thinks that national priorities are healthcare (no one is dying in the streets), college affordability (no lack of students in college these days), gay rights, etc. Roosevelt has socialistic and collectivistic leanings but at least he wasn’t afraid to kick butt.

I attended a prominent private university many years ago and most of my college buddies are liberal. I was shocked when, immediately after 9-11, many of them told me they were glad that Bush won instead of Gore. I think that if global war erupts there will be many middle America voters who will wish that McCain had won.


221 posted on 11/21/2008 10:58:06 AM PST by tom h
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 200 | View Replies]

To: antiRepublicrat

>>All new computers are loaded with Vista.<<

Ugh. Which by default has IE with ActiveX enabled, unfortunately. Javascript is bad enough.

But, unless you have seen all of their computers, you can’t know what all of them are running, and I would be surprised if some of the servers are not running some form of UNIX.


222 posted on 11/21/2008 10:58:50 AM PST by ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas (I want to "Buy American" but the only things for sale made in the USA are politicians)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 196 | View Replies]

To: cmurphy
Apple is JUST as hackable, it's just not as popular so you have less main stream viruses hitting those systems, as is Linux and other Unix based systems.

Hmmmmm. OK. It's just as hackable as a system that now has upwards of 500,000 known malware... but it has only 8 known trojans that require the complicity of the user to invade the system, and zero self-replicating, self-transmitting viruses, and zero spyware. Nine years of OS X and counting and still no need to run anti-virus, anti-spyware, or any other protective applications.

Just exactly what is the magic number when the Mac becomes popular enough to attract thieves and hackers? Is 10,000,000 enough? How about 20,000,000?

The Witty Worm was written by hackers to exploit a vulnerability in just 10,000 Black Ice firewall protected Windows PCs... and infected every single one of them within 45 minutes of being released in the wild.

A Spam-bot of just a few hundred or a few thousand Windows PCs is a very useful and valuable construct... yet there are ZERO Mac spam-bots sending out spam. Why is that?

There are now over 32 million OS X Macs in the world—surveys have shown that Mac owners are more prosperous and have more disposable dollars than PC users—yet the thieves are not going after them?99% of those Mac users are unprotected by anti-virus or anti-spy applications, yet they are NOT being successfully attacked by the thieves and hackers of the world. I would think they would be considered sitting ducks. Why aren't Macs being exploited left and right? Why aren't there thousands of Mac Spam Bots?

It certainly is not due to security by obscurity.

223 posted on 11/21/2008 11:06:16 AM PST by Swordmaker (Remember, the proper pronunciation of IE is "AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 217 | View Replies]

To: Sammy67

Whatever this thing is, it cannot be any worse than the Navy / Marine Corp Intranet, aka NMCI. The NMCI is a humongous, costly, self-inflicted Denial of Service attack. It demonstrates that even in DoD we learned nothing from the failures of Soviet style centralization.

By the way: the productive use of removable media in the unclassified environment will always far outweigh the risks coming from these devices. The command to ban removable devices is an unnecessary spasm illustrating DoD ineptness in building a reliable network infrastructure, particularly on NMCI. The ChiComs, or whomever, managed to introduce a bug in our systems. Our own flag officers and SESers multiplied this annoyance many fold with the ban on removable devices. Our enemies say thank you very much.


224 posted on 11/21/2008 11:55:38 AM PST by pontificus sanctimonius
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: antiRepublicrat

People can rationalize old versions of OSX all day long. They lost my organization as a customer and will never get us back. We switched to PCs with Win XP and haven’t had 1/100th of the problems. We were stupid enough to flirt with it once and it cost us a lot of money to get out from under the Macintrash. The computers were fine, it was the OS that sucked. Really sucked, to the point of drawing vacuum. The IT contractor made a small fortune off of us and any lead that suggests that we try it again is begging to be fired.

I don’t doubt that DoD could stay with Win XP, but they’re not. They’re going full speed ahead for Vista. I can’t speak for Vista having never even seen it, but I can’t find anybody who has anything good to say about it. #1 complaint: it’s a compatability nightmare.


225 posted on 11/21/2008 12:16:24 PM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity (Never argue with idiots. They'll pull you down to their level, then beat you with experience.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 196 | View Replies]

To: antiRepublicrat

Yep, that was it. Toward the end of that mess, someone with a big address book would have a mental lapse and click on one of them. They’d get angry phone calls from all over the world.


226 posted on 11/21/2008 12:36:37 PM PST by FlyVet
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 210 | View Replies]

To: Excuse_My_Bellicosity
People can rationalize old versions of OSX all day long. They lost my organization as a customer and will never get us back.

And I look at Windows XP (pre service pack) as an indicator of the state of the art in Windows today. Actually, the point is that an OS should advance the state of the art with every release. Vista took a step back on the whole. OS X has been advancing rapidly since its inception.

So far every release has been faster on the same compatible hardware while adding features. In fact, Apple is using this whole next release cycle for performance, security, development, compatibility and stability improvements (no new major user-facing features). It is ahead of Windows in pretty much every way.

Sounds like you also got a crappy contractor though.

They’re going full speed ahead for Vista.

I see DoD Windows machines often and know a lot of people who work with vast amounts of them daily, and they are all on XP on the client, 2003 on the server. There may be some DoD Vista machines out there, but they are relatively very few in number. They might even skip a Windows version and go straight to 7 for wide adoption.

227 posted on 11/21/2008 12:44:35 PM PST by antiRepublicrat
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 225 | View Replies]

To: Sammy67

Bill Ayers got a computer?


228 posted on 11/21/2008 4:35:47 PM PST by TheNewPundit
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Sammy67
Obama's got his secret clearance already?

This is why he could not pass the background check.

229 posted on 11/21/2008 4:36:18 PM PST by South40
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: eCSMaster
The *real* problem is homogeneity of OSes. The *only* answer is heterogeneity.
Some Windows, some Macs, some Linux, some OS/2 ...
Throughout history monocultures have come crashing down with crushing consequences. Yet we never seem to learn.


Yes. Seriously, though. A bad plot from a CIA movie a few years ago had a USB drive hidden in a coffee cup. Why doesn't the DOD have dumb terminals setup with no local storage? Even community colleges erase all non-necessary files at every reboot. Everything has to be saved on another server. The OS'es we are talking about are just front ends. UNIX is the only way they should go except for dumb terminals with no local storage after reboot.
230 posted on 11/21/2008 4:38:56 PM PST by MidasMulligan23
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 204 | View Replies]

To: Sammy67

External hardware devices like DVDs?!?!

Can anyone tell me how you plug a DVD into a USB port?


231 posted on 11/21/2008 5:33:43 PM PST by gogogodzilla (Live free or die!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Sammy67

I really hope that the pentagon wakes up and looks at the software/architecture they’re relying upon and the people they’ve put in charge of their systems instead of just going after people with usb keys. Just going by the story, this sounds like a typically bureaucratic CYA response. They should be lucky that their enemies launched a trial strike on them instead of in the middle of a war.


232 posted on 11/21/2008 7:29:32 PM PST by dr_who
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: big'ol_freeper

That is very interesting! You mean you believe they are moving to Apple for security reasons, not just purely IT reasons?


233 posted on 11/21/2008 9:50:21 PM PST by baa39 (www.FightFOCA.com - innocent lives depend on you)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies]

To: Swordmaker
Nine years of OS X and counting and still no need to run anti-virus, anti-spyware, or any other protective applications.

Yeah, but no hacker wants to bother being known as the guy who only cracked a few tens of millions of Macs when he could have been working on cracking a few hundred million PC's. These guys know numbers, and don't want to look like fools! ;-)
234 posted on 11/22/2008 3:58:25 AM PST by publiusF27
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 223 | View Replies]

To: Squantos

Hmmmm. Makes me wonder at times how good some of the IT folks really are. FWIW, I am now qualified as a GS-2210.


235 posted on 11/22/2008 4:11:38 AM PST by SLB (Wyoming's Alan Simpson on the Washington press - "all you get is controversy, crap and confusion")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Sammy67

“...the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD’s...”

If this is considered “unprecendented,” the Pentagon needs a new security department. Not bringing in outside hardware and software is a standard practice in the real world.


236 posted on 11/22/2008 7:14:36 AM PST by ExiledChicagoan (I see a red door and I want it painted black. But that's just me.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: pontificus sanctimonius

I’ve been trying to read up on the particulars of the apparent threat, so as to assess what risk we might have here at FR.

I suspect a fair number of FReepers have dayjobs associated with the government, some as contractors and / or military who fairly frequently use flash drives and cards or external USB devices.

So if the gov’t systems are threatened by such devices, what keeps other network links from being similarly at risk? Hence, wouldn’t FR also be at risk? Or minimally, what keeps those in the military who own PCs from having their PCs now infected from such a threat?

IMHO, the issue manifests command and control tendencies of the military. The US used to have an outstanding system of centralized command, decentralized control. Socialism tends to migrate in the opposite direction of decentralized command, with centralized control.

Users in a decentralized fashion are able to identify the situation as it arises, then take action with resources they control. Socialism tends to require the situation be communicated back to a centralized decision maker prior to releasing resources to solve a problem.

In the USB removal policy, we effectively remove resources from the local level and constrain all local action to using only resources from centralized strict control.

All an enemy now has to to then do is focus on communication to inhibit the defense machine from operating.

The internet was intended to provide an exponentially expandable network of alternate paths, thereby reducing the risk of lines of communication being interrupted in an attack.


237 posted on 11/22/2008 8:08:16 AM PST by Cvengr (Adversity in life and death is inevitable. Thru faith in Christ, stress is optional.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 224 | View Replies]

To: scfischer7

That’s easy to say, but very costly to implement. Enormous training and communication costs are reduced by using standard software packages. MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, .jpg and AutoCAD have helped immensely as common formats in engineering circles.

At least we aren’t arguing over ASCII vs EBCDIC.


238 posted on 11/22/2008 8:20:46 AM PST by Cvengr (Adversity in life and death is inevitable. Thru faith in Christ, stress is optional.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 173 | View Replies]

To: antiRepublicrat; Strategerist
How about a 17 year old kid from Lithuania?

Possible. Not only is China a great source of attacks, it's also a great source of open proxies for others around the world to use for attacks.


While a lot of the attacks trace back to Chinese servers, what are the chances that the majority of the attacks are sponsored outside the country?

There was an article (in the Washington Compost, I think) a number of months ago discussing how the Chinese hacker industry is just another underground business that has popped-up in China. The government just looks the other way as long as it doesn't interfere with the Will of the State..... of course if it helps the state, that's OK too ;-)

A number of these attacks may be the work of organized crime, whose origins could likely include the U.S. as well. When it comes to the Chinese, $$$ seems to be more important than ideology.
239 posted on 11/22/2008 10:15:09 AM PST by indthkr
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 209 | View Replies]

To: publiusF27
Yeah, but no hacker wants to bother being known as the guy who only cracked a few tens of millions of Macs when he could have been working on cracking a few hundred million PC's. These guys know numbers, and don't want to look like fools! ;-)

Right. No cracker wants to be famous as the first guy to write a self-replicating, self-transmitting virus that breeched the vaunted and well known imperviousness of Mac OS X; he'd rather be just one of the hundreds of thousands of "me too"s who have easily assailed the ramparts of Windows and remain lost in the crowd.

240 posted on 11/22/2008 10:17:01 AM PST by Swordmaker (Remember, the proper pronunciation of IE is "AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 234 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 181-200201-220221-240241-245 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson