Four Charged With Stealing Army Helicopter Training Software

itwbennett writes: Four alleged members of an international computer hacking ring face charges in the U.S. of breaking into the computer networks of the U.S. Army and several tech companies and stealing several software packages, including programs used to train Army helicopter pilots, as well as software and data related to the Xbox One gaming console, the Xbox Live online gaming service and popular games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Gears of War 3.

Comments

So who do you think the final buyer is?

[Required Snark]

Given all the "they deserve it", "it's not stealing, it's only copying", or comparisons to Civilization, who do you think they could sell it to? EA?

For anything coming out of the US Army, think China, Russia, India, Israel, the UK, France. It might be real military espionage, or straight commercial thievery. Both are bad.

In the military context, any inside information is a potential military advantage. I've had to look this up twice in the last week or so, so this time I'm not going to bother, but the Chinese hacked into BA on the F-35 project, and it cost a lot of time and money to recover. And that assumes that somehow you can recover from that kind of vast breach, which is not clear.

For the commercial military market, knowing about your competitors/vendors is a big economic win. It's a competitive advantage for bidding or knowing how to upgrade you product. Just because someone is an ally, that doesn't mean that they don't want to know all your secrets. Jonathon Pollard is serving a lift term (a nominal 30 years) for spying for Israel. It's alleged that some of the information he leaked ended up in the hands of the Soviet Union as well.

This isn't a bunch of fanboys getting into a game company network and getting artwork from a hotly anticipated game. It's billions of dollars and lives on the line. Grow up, whiny fanboys.