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DoD Lost 24k Files In Attack On Contractor
Trailrunner7 writes with this news from ThreatPost: "A targeted attack on a defense contractor in March of this year resulted in the theft of 24,000 files by an unknown attacker, according to Defense Department officials. The attack, which officials say was the work of a foreign government, would represent one of the more serious known attacks on the department and its contractors. In a speech Thursday in which he unveiled the Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, William J. Lynn, deputy defense secretary, said that the attack was just one of thousands such intrusions that the government and its contractors suffer every year."
Makes me feel so much better.
Coming to a torrent near you.
if suffer also implies that the attacker were successful or was it the only one that was successful?
the theft of 24,000 files of porn
Nuuuuuke 'em NOW !! If it's RED, it's better for us it's DEAD !!
I don't know how that did it. My cabinet has probably 150 files at best, and it weighs about 70 lbs. They must have used a really big truck and been awfully quick about it. Sounds like a team that specialized in file organization in the past - a rogue librarian thief ring!
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
Oh, wait. My laptop has 148k files. You mean to tell me that the DOD hasn't lost a single laptop before? And none have been hoovered??? Damn, they've got better security than we give them credit for!
> the attack was just one of thousands such intrusions that the government and its contractors suffer every year
No, the government and its contractors suffer from incompetence, a lack of encryption, authentication, and data handling procedures. They suffer from violations of their own process. "Here, take this database, decrypt it and email it to our vendor." They suffer from upper management promoted on rank and time served, not competence.
The intrusions aren't what they suffer... they are a direct consequence of the incompetence our government shows daily.
How's that debt ceiling coming? I'd like to have mine raised. The mortgage is due tomorrow.
E
Good job defending there.
Certainly not a pre-planned excuse to push for the 'permission' to monitor all internet traffic and have ISPs publish association data. I mean, you have to think more than a couple steps ahead and back to suspect social active measures, so obviously that isn't the case. Must be the terrorists. /adjusts tin-foil hat
Dear LulzSec & Anonymous
Please continue making headlines with your infodumps from .gov, .mil, and contractor websites.
It's not like you're doing much damage, considering the terabytes being siphoned off by foreign governments.
Maybe if there's a bright enough spotlight shone onto the problem, the government will finally get around to fixing it.
Thank You,
Joe Q. Public
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Who does these headlines? When something is lost, you do not have it any more.
Did the DoD really lose the files?
Or did they simply let some unauthorized someone(s) get a copy of said files?
Kinda reminds me of "I accidentally 93MB of .rar files. what should I dois this dangerous ?"
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
why are these machines even connected to the net?
You know, mitigating this risk is really easy..
Step 1: STOP PUTTING IT ON THE INTERNET !!!!!
Step 2: GOTO 'Step 1'
-or-
just go here: http://www.xkcd.com/916/
Serious part
They "lost" 24K files? You mean the attackers deleted and them and they didn't have backups?
Not-really-serious part (but wait, or is it?)
"Theft"? So the attacker has the files and the owners of the files don't have them anymore? Because that's what it means to steal a car or a diamond or cash.
Really, since they didn't do any of these things, shouldn't we say that these attackers "illegally copied" the documents and/or the information?
And are they really "intruders" or "attackers"? Maybe they're just "pirates".
So they don't know who did it, but they know it's a foreign government... Sounds like some pretty flimsy evidence to me.
Well that's what the gov't gets when they leave SONY in charge of security.
Makes you wonder who's responsible, and regrettably, I'd bet it was China... I try to avoid thinking this way because it resembles a Cold War kind of paranoia, but how could anyone with that paranoia NOT be justified to think this way? They're very passive-aggressive in their American relations, especially nowadays, and we all know they have the know-how to pull something like this off as their track record denotes a certain level of technical proficiency rivaled by only 2 or 3 countries. If not the Chinese, then maybe another superpower? Maybe Russia? If we're talking about rogue groups or single people, well, it could be anyone I suppose...
But whoever did it, it just goes to show how ignorant upper management types have become. Maybe I shouldn't explicitly blame upper management. Instead, maybe I should blame overall under-appreciation of the IT worker and the snot-nosed geeks who keep trying to pull peoples' heads out of their asses who have the abilities to do stuff about problems like these. We all know who goes first when job cuts come down the pipe... Maybe this shit is a wake-up call because the States have fallen behind everyone when it comes to defensive IT, let alone, general IT competitiveness with other countries.
Unfortunately, it's only going to get worse. Those squabbling fucks in office need to get their shit together and stop playing pucker lip with each other over pity shit that does nothing for the common American. Something's got to give...
24k ought to be enough for anyone.
No problem, it's the Defense Department. They can just hire another contractor, some fishy little sub-division of Lockheed or Raytheon who in turn hire other people to do the actual work. Their job is to link any incoming attacks to a geo IP database (easy, just steal some GPL'ed one) and automatically launch ICBMs against the threat.
It would be a waste of money to arm them with nukes, though. Cluster bombs or chemical weapons should suffice. Or, hey, how about this gay bomb? Is it still under development? Does it also work against hackers? Or, the CIA could give a helping hand. They could give away their gigantic porn database (stolen form the FBI) for free to the hackers...that will keep 'em occupied for years!
They wouldn't have lost the files when they were taken.
Badum-bump
I'm here all week, have the steak!
You have a computer with sensitive, classified information?
Then don't put it on the fucking Internet you retarded niggers.
I read the title quickly and couldn't figure out why 1) I had never heard of the DoD cycling team, and 2) why they would loose data attacking Contador, let alone time.
This is just an illustration of how stupid the "debt ceiling" concept is. You agreed to a mortgage with a payment schedule, and now a payment has come due. You didn't set a "debt ceiling" that requires you to get special permission from yourself to actually pay the bill, because... that would be stupid. You explicitly agreed you were going to pay the bill when you made the mortgage.
Mostly, arguments of the form "the government budget should operate more like a family budget" are dumb, because the government isn't like a family. But in the case of the debt ceiling, it's true.
I've felt & said much the same here, albeit not in the same tone: I.E.-> That the 1 GOOD THING these "benign hacker/cracker" types do, along w/ folks like Julian Assange + Bradley Manning, is that they EXPOSE PROBLEMS
* Problems that need a correct & proper fixing... because nothing is "unrecoverable" in society.
APK
P.S.=> Things can ALWAYS be fixed, especially by the TRUE problem solvers in our society (philosophers, scientists, & technicians mostly (yes, a combination of the hard & "soft pseudo sciences")), once they understand a given problem!
We need educated people, TRULY educated people, to be "@ THE HELM/WHEEL in society"... not "glad hander climbers"!
Once you get THAT? Things get better...
How it ever gets to THIS stage though? Boggles my mind, personally...
... apk