Iran's Hacking of US Navy 'Extensive,' Repairs Took $10M and 4 Months

cold fjord sends news that Iran's breach of a computer network belonging to the U.S. Navy was more serious than originally thought. According to a Wall Street Journal report (paywalled, but summarized at The Verge), it took the Navy four months to secure its network after the breach, and the repair cost was approximately $10 million. From the article: "The hackers targeted the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, the unclassified network used by the Department of the Navy to host websites, store nonsensitive information and handle voice, video and data communications. The network has 800,000 users at 2,500 locations, according to the Navy. ... The intrusion into the Navy's system was the most recent in a series of Iranian cyberoffensives that have taken U.S. military and intelligence officials by surprise. In early 2012, top intelligence officials held the view that Iran wanted to execute a cyberattack but had little capability. Not long after, Iranian hackers began a series of major "denial-of-service" attacks on a growing number of U.S. bank websites, and they launched a virus on a Saudi oil company that immobilized 30,000 computers. ... Defense officials were surprised at the skills of the Iranian hackers. Previously, their tactics had been far cruder, usually involving so-called denial of service attacks that disrupt network operations but usually don't involve a penetration of network security."

Comments

Asymetrical warfare

[cold fjord]

Missiles, ships, planes, tanks, and large groups of soldiers all cost a lot of money. As long as you have them you are on a perpetual upgrade cycle if you don't want to be outclassed. A geek with a computer is pretty cheap, can do a lot of things, and cause a lot of really inconvenient problems. If there is one thing Iran probably isn't short of it is smart people that like to play with computers. It isn't 1988 anymore, and the world has heard about the internet.

Re:Asymetrical warfare

[ZouPrime]

This is very true, but from the POV of the US, it is also a great argument for continuing to invest in offensive cyber capabilities.

In the end, it costs way less to attack a network than to secure it properly. And unfortunately, this asymmetrical situation could remain true for a long time.

This also can lead to a cult of the offensive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_offensive

Re:Asymetrical warfare

[khasim]

My first question would be ... how are we sure that Iran did this?

The second question would be how did whomever do it? We've heard about how the NSA/CIA/etc are stockpiling zero-day exploits. Stockpiling them instead of helping the vendors fix them. So were our systems cracked by an enemy using an exploit that we knew of?

The US Navy has lots of windows boxen

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

I know this because a client I once consulted for, sold 400,000 licenses for their Windows product to the Navy.

Windows isn't so bad if it's properly locked down, but it's not really possible to do that unless all of your application are Windows Logo-compliant, for example they don't store end-user documents in the Program Files folder. I expect the military has a lot of homebrew software they absolutely need to use, that prevents Program Files from being locked down.

Also everyone who actually administrates a windows box, has to actually know how to lock it down.

• USS Yorktown Dead In Water After Divide By Zero

The Navy's Smart Ship technology is being considered a success, because it has resulted in reduced manpower, workloads, maintenance and costs for sailors aboard the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown. However, in September 1997, the Yorktown suffered a systems failure during maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, VA., apparently as a result of the failure to prevent a divide by zero in a Windows NT application. The zero seems to have been an erroneous data item that was manually entered. Atlantic Fleet officials said the ship was dead in the water for about 2 hours and 45 minutes. A previous loss of propulsion occurred on 2 May 1997, also due to software. Other system collapses are also indicated. [Source: Gregory Slabodkin, Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water, Government Computer News, 13 Jul 1998, PGN Stark Abstracting from http://www.gcn.com/gcn/1998/Ju... ...

``Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor,'' said Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk.