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US Military 'Hacked' by Emails
An anonymous reader writes "Two of the US Military's most important science labs were apparently 'hacked'. Phishing mail was sent to a pair of research labs, where trojan programs allowed interlopers access to the otherwise secure networks. One of the sites was the infamous Los Alamos, which has been discussed many times here at Slashdot for its string of security breaches. 'Los Alamos has a checkered security history, having suffered a sequence of embarrassing breaches in recent years. In August of this year, it was revealed that the lab had released sensitive nuclear research data by email, while in 2006 a drug dealer was allegedly found with a USB stick containing data on nuclear weapons tests. "This appears to be a new low, even drug dealers can get classified information out of Los Alamos," Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), said at the time. Two years earlier, the lab was accused of having lost hard disks.'"
Is it really worth pouring more money into this idiotville if every bit of scientific progress they make is practically public knowledge soon after? Just shut the stupid place down!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
that they fell for a Nigerian 411 scam
losers
fire these retards
Unclassified networks get viruses and trojans often, this is not really news. Nor is it "omg huge security breach" that an unclassified network would get a virus. That is the the whole reason classified and unclassified networks and physically separated.
This simply further illustrates the need for better IT proffessionals. Most IT departments are looked at like maintence departments(In non IT firms). Something they are REQUIRED to have but not greatly to there advantage. Yes we introduce newer better software to increase productivity but we do it at a cost. So when it comes to IT security the budget is always smaller then should be. No one wants to pay more for the janitors to clean the locks every week. The locks still require keys and that is good enough. No one cares that the locks can be picked in 2 seconds.. as long it needs a key its fine. The same with IT. No one cares that you can be hacked because you send all you're data through unencrypted ethernet and that same network segment has a wifi-AP. You can't access either without a username or password.. right?!
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I kid.
those ICBMs don't have ethernet jacks for their firmware updates ;)
Both labs in question are actually U.S. Department of Energy, not Department of Defense. Technically, they're not "military" labs.
More to the point, if they were military labs, the schlubs responsible for the security cockups would have been in the brig and awaiting a court-martial long ago. The knowledge that your "employer" can clap you in prison and then have you shot for almost a trivial incident is, to borrow a phrase, tremendously attention-focusing.
Yeah, yeah, I know, nuclear weapons and technology, blah, blah, blah... but really. Historically, these labs have always been run a little bit like the average academic research lab at any mainline university, and the stereotypes about egghead scientist types hating military-style regimentation (including security processes) rings very true. Read up about the Manhattan Project. (Which is fitting, since these labs are the direct descendants of that program.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
People in a company I was working for awhile ago received a phishing email that was targeted to us and our environment. I, and a few other people noticed something weird. I did research and realized it was phishing fairly quickly and got the network people to immediately block that site and send out mail to everybody asking anybody who visited that site before it was blocked to have their computer fully checked for malware.
I think we narrowly avoided disaster that day, and I suspect none of the security people (I was not among them) quite realized exactly what happened. I was immensely surprised by how targeted it was.
I can easily understand why a user might've been taken in, and I don't blame them at all. I found the whole thing very unsettling.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Mushroom clouds be in order, beeyach!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
they were using Linux!
No one can hack into a classified (Secret or above) network from the outside by sending them emails or anything else - *because classified networks are not connected to the outside world*.
Brett
PEBCAK rules here, unfortunately. The DoD has some pretty well thought out electronic security measures, one of the best being the total segregation of class/unclass networks. This doesn't stop users from ignoring those measures in favor of laziness, though. Having worked with them I can testify to them being a pain in the ass.
PEBKC...
If you know your history, our government and military have always used campaigns of disinformation against our enemies. Maybe sensitive information was stolen, but there is an equal chance they simply recognized the attack and allowed "sensitive information" to be compromised. That's just my opinion, I guess we'll never really know.
The distinction between "classified" and "unclassified" networks parent is referring to comes from The Register's coverage of the same story. The PCWorld link in the original submission makes no mention of whether or not the networks were classified or not.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
My dearest Omnifarious.
Compliments of the day. My name is Mr.Moses Odiaka.I work in the credit and accounts department of Union Bank of NigeriaPlc,Lagos, Nigeria. I write you in respect of a foreign customer with a Domicilliary account. His name is Engineer Manfred Omnifarious. He was among those who died in a plane crash here in Nigeria during the reign of late General Sani Abacha.
Since the demise of this our customer, Engineer Manfred Omnifarious, who was an oil merchant/contractor, I have kept a close watch of the deposit records and accounts and since then nobody has come to claim the money in this a/c as next of kin to the late Engineer. He had only $18.5mllion in his a/c and the a/c is coded. It is only an insider that could produce the code or password of the deposit particulars. As it stands now,you are the closest next of kin alive to claim Engineer Manfred Omnifarious's estates.
I hereby ask for your co operation in using your name as the next of kin to the deceased to send these funds out to a foreign offshore bank a/c for mutual sharing between myself and you. At this point I am the only one with the information because I have removed the deposit file from the safe.By so doing, what is required is to send an aplication laying claims of the deposit on your name as next of kin to the late Engineer Omnifarious. I will need your full name and address telephone/fax number,company or residential, also your bank name and account,where the money will be transfer into.
I am currently in europe for a six months course,you can reach me on this number for further discussion 0031 623 663.Kindly send your reply to my private email address stated below.
Trusting to hear from you,
I remain Respectfully yours,
Mr Moses Odiaka.
(0031 623 663)
I live fairly near the Oak Ridge (TN) area. The National Labs there have done the same sort of work as Los Alamos since both sites were founded in the 40's. Contracts keep tending to go preferentially to Los Alamos - it currently gets roughly 4 times the government dollars overall, 5 times the spending on specifically Nuclear Deterrent related research, and is getting over 10 times the historical preservation funding to preserve its historic buildings. (That's just from the public record, without taking black budget spending into account. I don't know if that distorts the figures or not, obviously).
The Oak Ridge labs safety and security records are both far superior to Los Alamos. (While neither location has a perfect record, even non-serious rated incidents at ORNL have averaged many years apart. There has never been a security incident involving the ORNL facilities that didn't end up with the FBI at least knowing exactly what information was compromised, who did it, and who got it in the end, while there are three incidents on record for LA that no investigator can tell the congressional oversight committee just what may have been stolen, if they are confident they found everyone who did it or not, or if a particular hostile foreign government may possibly have ended up getting the info.).
There's also the Argonne labs in the Chicago area. Arguably, if there's some reason not to transfer more of LAs work to OR, they are also a better prospect if the US really cares about security. Los Alamos has had several opportunities to clean up their act - the problems are apparently systemic, and nothing short of major funding losses seems at all likely to motivate them at this point.
Who is John Cabal?
I've worked with a couple of the National Laboratories, and where Los Alamos really shines is basic research, while the others are better at engineering and have (somewhat) better security track records. This makes some sort of sense given the fact that they were operated by a university for so long while Sandia and Livermore have been over-seen by corporate entities. While it may make sense to move some of the more sensitive stock-pile stewardship programs away from there if they can't improve their security, it would be an absolute shame to shut the lab down altogether.
So, hackers using Web2.0 bricked Los Alamos by spearphishing, to get all the inappropriate buzzwords out of the way... but is social engineering really cracking the system? If you convince someone to give you the keys to the car and then you steal the car, that's nothing wrong with the car. In this case, it's possible that a better design might make it impossible for someone to give the keys to the wrong people, but nobody else has a flawless solution for that, either.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I will grant that cybersecurity problems at national labs should be taken seriously. But there are at least 10,000 people doing at least part of their research at national labs, much of it inherently internet-based and hardly any of it has military applications. It is unreasonable to expect that no computers at a national lab will ever get hacked. Any computer that is connected to a network has a non-zero probability of getting hacked. I am doing my doctoral research at a national lab (Brookhaven) and have been in far too many meetings where we had to figure out how to work with security measures implemented in response to stories like this, which tend to paper over important details. The story says nothing about what information was actually acquired through the attack, for instance. And it neglected to mention that the "drug dealer" didn't actually have the USB stick with classified information, but rather lived with a person who worked at LANL and had illegally brought it home. He didn't even know he had anything classidied. (As usual, *people* are the weakest point in security, not computers.) As someone already commented, this is a Department of Energy Lab, not a "military" lab. Much, if not most, of the research at LANL is not classified. Just because someone at LANL got hacked does not mean classified information got hacked, nor does it mean that the computers that got hacked were remotely related to anything with the word "nuclear" in the subject. Among the measures which were proposed to remedy Brookhaven's "problems" with cybersecurity were banning all non-US citizens from logging in to any computer outside of BNL. There is a collider at BNL which has, overall, cost about $1B to build and run. This rule would have essentially stop this collider from running, costing the government about $1B, along with ending a promising scientific program. There were other rules proposed that we had to password-protect every computer - which is very dangerous if that computer controls an apparatus that operates at high voltage so someone who forgets or doesn't know the password can't turn it off. The slew of cyber-security updates imposed on BNL by DOE in response the the hysteria over cyber security caused me personally to lose two weeks of productivity because it was so hard to get into the computer clusters I needed to use for my research. There were about 1000 scientists affected by the same thing - we easily lost 20 person-years of labor, if not more. Even if you assume that everyone earned a grad student salary, that's $500,000. Overall, I have been in meetings which consumed about 40 hours of roughly 20 PhD scientists' time trying to figure out how to work around these rules. None of this includes the lost time because all of our computer experts were working on security instead of supporting the research goal of the lab. And what is at risk at Brookhaven? Data on relativistic heavy ion collisions. I personally think that if someone were really interested enough in our data to try to steal it, it would be a major development for the field. Oh man, and if they analyzed it - find those lambda baryons! - it would really decrease the work load in our collaboration. Please, take our data and analyze it for us! There's essentially no risk of permanent data loss because of multiple backups on various types of media in different geographical locations - you'd have to take out everything at once. The biggest real risk is that we would get hacked and turned into a porn server. Embarrassing, yes. Catastrophic? No. It happens to servers all the time. And indeed the one time I'm aware of BNL getting hacked, at least while I've been there, and all they did was sneak links to porn sites into an obscure webpage, not host porn on any BNL computers. (Which none of the stories mentioned... They all said BNL was hosting porn.) So what am I saying? 1. Simply because of the size and number of national labs, it is unreasonable to expect that national labs will never get hacked. 2. The response needs to be proportional to the risk. If the rules are too strict, this costs money, with no benefit.
the Transformers to hack the military? Phht! Hollywood, so unrealistic these days...
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
There should be a law that requires any databases that hold social security numbers to be purged after three years or when the data is no longer needed, whichever comes first.
Oh wait, that might be construed and thoughtful. Never mind.
Lets hope it doesn't get so easy that cavemen can build nukes, or we'll never recover from WW3.
God spoke to me.
Quoth the headline: "Los Alamos has a checkered security history" ...
Hey, where I work we don't talk like that. I interpret that to be a politically correct, human resources filtered, public official sanctioned version of the statement: "They're about as secure as a hooker's panties on New Years Eve in Times Square."
I could be wrong, of course.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
There's always Sneakernet
LANL and ORNL aren't "military" labs. They are Department of Energy labs. ORNL doesn't even deal with weapons. > ...even drug dealers can get
> classified information out of Los Alamos
Jessica the Q wasn't a drug dealer.
It was her roomate.
That's not a universally implemented security mechanism, even within the DoD.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
"This appears to be a new low, even drug dealers can get classified information out of Los Alamos," Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), said at the time.
Hey! Some of us take offense to that!
Hey kid, hey you, kid ... you wanna get high? Just show me Mr. Jackson ... yeah, that's right. Come to daddy.
POGO? Couldn't be more perfect.
These labs are run by the Department of Energy, not Defense.
They are not defense labs, they are scientific research institutes.
They also provide several large experimental facilities (>$200M) that universities could never afford to run, that give free access to profs who want to use them.
POGO have a political ax to grind, in that they represent the Luddites who are scared of anything that might be related to "nuclear".
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Yeah, it is. Classified networks are not hooked up to the internet.
Of course it takes just one wise guy to bring his laptop home, hook it up to the Internet, get pwned, then re-attach it to the classified network again, and presto -- your malware has access to the classified network! Now it can collect "interesting" information to its heart's content, and the next time the guy brings his laptop home, it can surreptitiously send it back to you
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Drug dealers fund terrorists! It was all over the commercials after 9/11...
8==8 Bones 8==8
It still amazes me that anyone could believe any of the conspiracy theories, the U.S. Govt couldn't successfully keep anything secret.
UFO Conspiracies?, Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy?, Secret Commissions Directing Foreign Policy?, Bah phoey!
Lets face it, nothing as big as the Atomic bomb, or as small as Monica Lewinsiki's cigar stays secret for long.
We might as well do nuclear research live on CSPAN, at least then only 5 or 6 people will see it.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Now, who knows what kind of stuff is rated less than secret. It's probably somewhere in sensitivity between the bills for the Coke machines and Osama bin Laden's cell phone number.
But most likely the article is some activist trying to stir up FUD, or just the usual sloppy, lazy journalism.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
why the hell are attachments allowed to be delivered via email at all? It makes it just too easy to get infected. For example, on my own system incoming attachments are removed and placed into a user folder on a network drive. The email itself has an addendum that tells the user that the attachment cannot be accessed from within the email client, and provides the location of the file on the network (no hyperlink, nothing to click on.) That simple action makes it impossible for a user to stupidly click on an attachment (he has to want to go get it) and eliminates any possibility of the email client autoexecuting it. Yes, stupid people will still go out to the network folder and click on "Britney Spears Breasts.jpg.pif.zip.exe", but they have to make an effort. It helps.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
According to ABC News and several other news outlets, authorities have tracked the hacker attacks back to China.
This is not too surprising, since several recent high profile hacker attacks have originated from china targeting various countries around the world. It's nothing new that China is continuing to hack into our top secret and sensitive installations.
In the coming days, you can expect China to adamantly deny any involvment, just as they have when earlier this year the German, UK, Australian and US governments have accused them of hacking into top secret installations.
No one can hack into a classified (Secret or above) network from the outside by sending them emails or anything else - *because classified networks are not connected to the outside world*.
I think you mean:
*because classified networks are supposed not connected to the outside world*
As other people have already said, policy and reality are 2 different things. I've done some contract work for my state police headquarters and was shocked to find an unsecured, dhcp enabled wireless gateway accessible from outside the building connected to the polices Intranet. The section responsible: The Computer Crime Section.
This from the same organisation that instructed the then IT security manager to destroy her report on serious problems in their network and infrastructure because it would cost money to fix and "if we destroy the report a) No one will know about the areas of weakness to exploit them and b) If we are compromised we can claim we did not know that anything was wrong."
Your only as secure as them dumbest employee or boss.
Sorry to post anon but Id rather continue getting government work.
The offices I'm tasked with securing have 2+ unconnected networks - 1+ for LAN access, and 1 for Internet access. NONE of the computers are connected to the LAN(s) and the Internet. Bridging your network to the outside World is how all these fools get hacked.
This is NOT Rocket Science.
No it isn't. I have lived with somebody who has top security clearance and works as defense contractor for the DoD, and their laptop (on which most of their work, some of which is classified, is done) is connected to the internet from a static IP address at home every day.
Oh, and I have full access to it.
That computer never has any classified on it. If it does your friend/roommate is guilty of a serious security breach. Now just because they work on classified information does not mean it happens on that machine. It is not uncommon to find an unclass machine sitting next to a classified machine, it shouldn't happen in a TS environment but it most likely does. The classfied work occurs on the classified machine, the unclass work happens on the unclass machine.
And I guarentee that unclassified laptop never goes into the SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility, which is where the TS will be) with your friend when they are going to work on TS stuff. It just doesn't happen. Every such facility has someone on duty whenever the facility is open who's primary job is to make sure that such events don't happen. They will make sure no cell phones, mp3 players, computers, furby's or other gadgets with recording capabilities enter the facility.
Most likely your roommate was telling fibs to impress you. It's a very common, yet childish occurance among those who have high level clearances, brag about what you do, and what you supposedly are able to get away with.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
and answer some small questions for us!
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
If it was truly classified, then your roommate was/is an idiot and should lose their job and clearance. More than likely, though, the information was sensitive, but unclassified (SBU), or For Official Use Only (FOUO). Even in that case, the folders are supposed to be encrypted even on the unclassified machine.
Another case of a stupid user, not an indication of DoD security.
I think you are generally right but I doubt that everything classified in the world is kept on a private network and sealed physically from the internet and the world. Because then it could never be hacked from the outside, and a number of DoD, DoE and other places have been hacked at the classified level from all the way over in China. Also, the isolated servers that sit underground in california are sitting right next to the internet-enabled ones, so this SCIF stuff is not true.
Trust me, the government is very hackable, and it runs on Windows.
All your nuclear secrets are belong to us.
I'm more of the mind that we should share information freely because a rising tide moves all ship, but move money out of military budgets and into social programs.
Blar.
professionals
Ask Me About... The 80's!
maintenance
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Yes, but in the federal government costing money to fix is considered a good point. It means overtime, contractor selection (translate - kickbacks), increased budget, and maybe an opportunity for the computer security guys to expand their turf slightly. The only issue is whether after spending this money they'll actually fix the problem - if they don't then they have an execuse to repeat the whole exercise the next year...
Actually, that isn't a solution. People working on Linux desktops can be tricked into entering their logins and passwords just as readily as people working on Windows desktops. Also, if you know the environment well enough, Firefox has enough holes that PCs can still become infected with malware. With the way most corporations standardize applications and rollout you can learn what version of various things everybody's desktop is likely to have and specifically target your malware at it.
Something you can do that doesn't address the malware issue, but does address the password capturing issue is to use secure ID dongles for all logins form outside the firewall. That way capturing a password isn't enough because there's a component of the password you just captured that will change in less than 60 seconds.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.