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Hackers Breached US Army Servers
An anonymous reader writes "A Turkish hacking ring has broken into 2 sensitive US Army servers, according to a new investigation uncovered by InformationWeek. The hackers, who go by the name 'm0sted' and are based in Turkey, penetrated servers at the Army's McAlester Ammunition Plant in Oklahoma in January. Users attempting to access the site were redirected to a page featuring a climate-change protest. In Sept, 2007, the hackers breached Army Corps of Engineers servers. That hack sent users to a page containing anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric. The hackers used simple SQL Server injection techniques to gain access. That's troubling because it shows a major Army security lapse, and also the ability to bypass supposedly sophisticated Defense Department tools and procedures designed to prevent such breaches."
You are wrong on so many levels. If you can't even bother to protect against simple things as SQL injection, I have a nasty feeling about the overall security.
Why aren't classified information on a separate network, not connected to the Net? Please: this is not 1980 anymore - protect critical information seriously.
So much for Information Week being reasoned and sensible.
"Equally troubling is the fact that the hacks appear to have originated outside the United States. Turkey is known to harbor significant elements of the al-Qaida network. It was not clear if "m0sted" has links to the terrorist group."
Hooray for sensationalism!
I didn't bother to RTFA, but summary is inflamatory at best.
A public-facing, high-profile (perception) server gets compromised? That's not news.
Let's say it is news for a minute. What was the budget for this public-facing project? This is not a "major Army security lapse" by any stretch of the imagination.
Of course, my line of thinking wouldn't be widely accepted because it ignores the emotional response that the summary probably provokes in most people.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
How do you know that classified intelligence was even obtained? Why are you even assuming that the security of these servers, an ammunition plant and the Army Corps of Engineers no less, will have the same security as that of the Pentagon? Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the Army would appropriate security based on how vital their assets are?
Why aren't classified information on a separate network, not connected to the Net
It is, in fact there are multiple, separate networks.
Other than the author repeating the word "sensitive" over and over again, there wasn't anything concrete in the article about whether the information was actually classified. I suspect it wasn't.
How do you know the code was recently written? More likely, the app was written years ago, before the phrase "sql injection" was even coined.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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So, what do I need to do, type really really slow?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Ok so someone defaced a website used by the US Army. How do we know that the website is not hosted by a 3rd party provider? Also how are we sure that sensitive information and the website are on the same network? Also the army may not have codded the website so it could have just been piss poor coding by a 3rd party web developer and not the contractor who codes the programs that control the sensitive information.
In other words just because the front end website for the Army got defaced that means nothing. It is like defacing the IRS website. It means nothing till you have peoples tax returns being rerouted to your personal bank account.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
That is not true. When you work for a military contractor you would be amazed at the amount of classified information which is available on the shared drives.
No--it is not directly available to the internet, but how many exploits does it take to hijack a browser and gain a command prompt or a vector to the injection of bytecode? How about hijack a browser and progressively insert holes in the compromised system until a backdoor can be opened? Sure, going to www.military-contractor.com and trying to force a way from their web server to their firewall to the internal network is difficult (though still not impossible), it is much easier to lace the 'net with booby traps. Think joke sites, humor sites, sites with flashplayer or java games or comics or even seemingly legitimate business presentations. How many exploits have we seen in codecs for music, even?
Classified information may not exist on systems you think are accessed from the internet--but classified information sure as heck exists on the drives shared to systems which are used as clients to the internet. There really is no difference once the fiber (or copper) is connected.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Um, I'd say that any website from a personal website with nothing terribly important on it to the system used to launch nuclear weapons should guard against something as simple as SQL injection. Now, you might not want to have passwords 468000 characters long for a lower security website, but surely blocking SQL injection is something all websites should guard against.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Yeah! In 3500BC we had the ability to kill shit. In 2009 we have the ability to kill shit. What exactly did we gain?
You're making an entirely different point from the one you think you're making.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Web server page redirection? Should that scare me? I mean, it's not quite as if somebody smuggled munitions or fired a weapon.
"Oh...but the breach reveals the military's vulnerability."
Does it? To what?
Answer: To webserver page redirection.
Might there be greater risk here? Perhaps. But no evidence was presented to indicate that. Get back to me when you've identified a MATERIAL RISK, not merely a TECHNICAL VULNERABILITY.
As for those of you who have hopes and expectations that ALL THINGS MILITARY will be secure...WTF?
I'm hardly one to defend MS products, but come on.
SQL injection is hardly "a security vulnerability in Microsoft's SQL Server database." SQL injection is a result of badly written code. Nothing more. There is never an excuse for that to occur, even in environments where security isn't the top priority.
The whole article feels a bit off to me. I get the sense it was written by somebody with little technical cluefulness. I particularly like the line about "sophisticated Defense Department tools and procedures designed to prevent such breaches" followed by a sentence identifying AV software. Written by a dummy, for similarly intelligent people, perhaps?
The folks that take care of the important stuff aren't stupid and are highly paranoid.
Not sure where you're getting your facts from, but from my years in the military I'd venture to say that you're a bit overconfident. There are plenty of ways for sensitive data to find its way into the hands of outsiders.