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."

Comments

Only a few terabytes?

[Kayden]

What kind of connection do you need to have to get away with several terabytes of data before someone notices? Users on my network get pissy when someone downloads a few dozen megs.

Re:Only a few terabytes?

[TheRaven64]

They probably trickled it out over a long period. The more interesting question is how long ago the DoD noticed the breach and started providing doctored information. In the Soviet era, it was common to use this kind of thing for misinformation. Once a project has been compromised, you feed plausible-looking but wrong information down the leaking conduit for as long as possible. There was an interesting example of this posted on Wikileaks a year or so ago, of an American nuclear bomb design obtained from the Russians, which contained a few minor and difficult-to-find design flaws that would have prevented the bomb from actually working if it had been built along those lines.

Re:Only a few terabytes?

[Anonymous Coward]

They also did that during the Reagan administration with a software package designed to run the valves on a natural gas pipeline.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002

The software was modified to run just fine for a while, but then go haywire. The end result was "...the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space...".

This occurred in 1982. I'm sure they're still doing exactly the same thing today.

Do not underestimate Western-security procedures.

[reporter]

Do not underestimate the cleverness of American-intelligence procedures.

Note that Chinese intruders succeeded in numerous attempts at downloading information related to the F-35 jet fighter. After the 1st such attempt, American intelligence would have become aware of the incident.

If you were a smart intelligence officer, what would you do after the 1st attempt?

You would not publicly announce the breach of security. Rather, you would plant false data into the same computer which was compromised. When the Chinese hacker returns to it to download even more information, then he would get gigabytes of fake data.

The aim is for the Chinese military to develop countermeasures against F-35 performance characteristics that does not exist. When the actual F-35 is deployed, it will defeat those countermeasures and deliver its nuclear payload to Beijing -- on time and on target.