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Hackers Breach White House Network

Posted by Soulskill on from the dozens-of-solitaire-games-compromised dept.

wiredmikey writes: The White House's unclassified computer network was recently breached by intruders, a U.S. official said Tuesday. While the White House has not said so, The Washington Post reported that the Russian government was thought to be behind the act. Several recent reports have linked Russia to cyber attacks, including a report from FireEye on Tuesday that linked Russia back to an espionage campaign dating back to 2007. Earlier this month, iSight Partners revealed that a threat group allegedly linked with the Russian government had been leveraging a Microsoft Windows zero-day vulnerability to target NATO, the European Union, and various private energy and telecommunications organizations in Europe. The group has been dubbed the "Sandworm Team" and it has been using weaponized PowerPoint files in its recent attacks. Trend Micro believes the Sandworm team also has their eyes set on compromising SCADA-based systems.

4 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Russians as bogeymen? by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yup, every time someone does this .. it's the Russians or the Chinese.

    I think Western spy agencies have jumped the shark so much in terms of what they do, that you could plausibly say it's really them doing all of this and doing it as a false-flag operation.

    I mean, come on, these clowns have been proven to be spying on the people who are meant to oversee them. They don't give a shit about the law, just their own powers.

    You can't come up with a conspiracy theory which is paranoid enough these days -- because long-thinkers with massive resources really are doing all of this shit these days.

    Hell, breaking into the Whitehouse systems lets you say you need more money for spying to prevent this kind of shit. And then you get the keys to the kingdom.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  2. Stop using Microsoft products? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If the news was "bad guys leveraged a vulnerability in the White House's cardboard gate to break through", would people acknowledge the breach without questioning the cardboard gate?

    1. Re:Stop using Microsoft products? by Minwee · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If the news was "bad guys leveraged a vulnerability in the White House's cardboard gate to break through", would people acknowledge the breach without questioning the cardboard gate?

      Or would the media refuse to report on the Gate? It's about ethics, I tell ya'.

  3. Success! by NetNed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Step one: get person to "hack" the white house network
    Step two: Claim "It's Russia!"
    Step Three: Stir up media reports about "How safe is the internet really" and "Do we need the government to police the internet?"
    Step four: Put in place controls that cripple the internet, spies on all Americans, and causes more laws to be written that stomp of the rights of Americans.


    Yeah they can track down who is illegally downloading the latest Bastille album but they have these loose "links" to Russia that they claim if "fact!" it is them.


    Couldn't be THIS could it?????