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Cyber Attacks On US Military Jump Sharply In 2009
angry tapir writes "Cyber attacks on the US Department of Defense — many of them coming from China — have jumped sharply in 2009, a US congressional committee has reported. Citing data provided by the US Strategic Command, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said that there were 43,785 malicious cyber incidents targeting Defense systems in the first half of the year. That's a big jump. In all of 2008, there were 54,640 such incidents. If cyber attacks maintain this pace, the yearly increase will be around 60 percent. The full report (PDF) is available online."
That's a lot of money... That's almost 8 full hours of what is being spent on Iraq.
And here I was, thinking that the Presidential Apology Tour would make it all better.
On a serious note, by moving our high tech industry offshore we have helped to make it happen. Now, with a broken economy, we appear weak, and we invite ridicule and attack. Clever bandaids added to firewalls will make little difference long term. We need to regain strength and respect. This is not just a technical problem. Our recent administrations (Republicrats and Demopublican alike) through suicidal short-sighted policies aimed only to benefit a few fat cats have made us an easy target. Such is the fate of a fallen giant. Everyone wants to kick him. After all, what are we going to do about it?
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I have linux boxes all over the place and there are literally thousands of ssh/sft/etc attempts on each box each day. None of them are successful though. Can I claim that my boxes have more attacks than the US Military?
A better approach may be to rig some computers so that they are easy to hack. We install some deliberately malicious software on those fake computers. Then, we disperse those fake computers among the real computers.
Here is the ideal scenario. A typical Chinese hacker will probe all the computers at the Department of Defense. The probe will easily succeed in penetrating one of the rigged computers. He downloads plenty of software. He will then try to run them. One of the ill-gotten applications then replicates itself and spreads throughout the Chinese Ministry of War.
The rogue application disables the safety mechanism in a Chinese nuclear warhead. On the anniversary of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the warhead explodes. It melts (literally) the entire military base and kills thousands of Chinese citizens in the nearby town.
On the day of that fire ball, the Chinese hackers will cease their activities for several months.
China is in a cold war with the west. These attacks are also going after European and Oceania countries. The question is, when will the west realize that the same means that was used to stop USSR is being quietly used against the West.
Are there actually that many more attacks, or are they just detecting more of them? I wouldn't be at all surprised if in years past, a lot of military computers have been pwned without anyone knowing it happened ... especially given the DoD's ongoing love affair with Windows.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You're assuming that the software controlling nuclear warheads is exposed to the network. The US certainly isn't stupid enough to do that, and I doubt China is either.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The PRC is also recruiting from its growing population of technically skilled people, including those from the private sector, to increase its cyber capabilities. It is recruiting skilled cyber operators from information technology firms and computer science programs into the ranks of numerous Information Warfare Militia units.
"cyber operators".. "Information Warfare Militia".. What?
Try actually reading the linked PDF and see if you can take it seriously. All this stuff about increased "cyber attack incidences" and I can find absolutely nothing explicitly linking any incident with the Chinese government or anything even making explicit what a "cyber attack incident" is. (Also "cyber warfare" is a pretty small part of the report itself; the report isn't about "cyber-warfare", but US-China relations.)
cyber-space (the electro-magnetic spectrum)
I think that quote just about sums it up. I am stunned that people here on slashdot are taking this seriously, this is the sort of thing I'd expect to see on Fox News.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
You are simply the result of the many worms working its way through the net. All Western DOD's are under attack and are actively targeted.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Does this really tell me anything? Not really? What kind of "cyber attacks" are that? SSH break-in attempts? Bots looking for known holes? Script kiddies? Mail relay attempts? Or targeted attempts specifically designed to get access to their system? If I go for the script kiddie/SSH category I get around 25.000 attempts a year on one server alone, according to ossec.
This could also just mean that the number of attacks has risen generally and not specifically against the DoD.
So many unanswered questions ...