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Computer Spies Breach $300B Fighter-Jet Project
suraj.sun writes "Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks. Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force's air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft."
Actually it won't, and this is one of the reasons a few countries pulled out of the JSF project. The DoD is refusing to release source code for the weapons-control systems and their partners did not want to be flying expensive fighters when they had not been able to audit the code that controlled the weapons and had no idea if the USA had added a remote kill switch (the key for which had then been stolen by enemy-of-the-day and used to disable the fighters).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Systems containing classified data are NEVER connected to the internet. Any classified data that was siphoned off was left their either maliciously or through stupidity by someone on the inside. In either case, if this really did happen, the person should be tried for treason. Not only are these other networks locked down from the internet, they are also locked down physically - kept away from windows, often in a vault and physical access is tightly controlled.
Any other data that was acquired was probably crap. I strongly suspect that this is another case of fear mongering by an organization trying to get additional funding.
The alternative, which is almost too scary for me to consider, is that we have changed our practices and now leave sensitive information critical to our defense on unprotected systems.