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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. The unclassified network? by StevenMaurer · · Score: 5, Funny

    This XKCD comic comes to mind...

  2. 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.
  3. Re:Failed objective by bioteq · · Score: 5, Funny

    I remember back in high-school (long, long ago,) one of my teachers was attempting to show off the school's new-fangled-lightning-fast T1 line. So he brought up whitehouse.com, not realizing that he had made a horrid mistake.

    Unfortunately, that was the first exposure to porn some of my classmates had encountered. It was a sad day for them, realizing there is porn on the internet.

    Ironically, I missed school for the next four days.

  4. Way ahead of his time. by Minwee · · Score: 5, Funny

    If only they had listened to Scott McNealy back in 1997...

    We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, "What a huge waste of corporate productivity." So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, "What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work."