March 10, 2008

Data stolen from Pentagon

It will be a year in June when it was announced that there had been an attack on the Pentagon, which is effectively the US forces head office. At the time the Defence Secretary Robert Gates admitted that there had been an attack and that it had been successful causing chaos to the email service used by around 1,500 personnel.

But what wasn’t made very clear last year was the extent of the attack, it seems that the attack was discovered when an IT restructuring plan was being carried out. Although the attack was discovered it had been part of a planned breach of the Pentagons defences and had taken place around two months earlier.

Once detected it was soon discovered that some malicious software had got into the system through a known windows exploit, this code was spread through email travelling throughout the network and onto others, once the email was opened it sent the username and password back to where it originally came from.

Source [Ars Technica]