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State Department Joins NOAA, USPS In Club of Hacked Federal Agencies
Hot on the heels of recent cyber attacks on NOAA, the USPS, and the White House, the New York Times reports that the U.S. State Department has also suffered an online security breach, though it's not clear who to blame.
“This has impacted some of our unclassified email traffic and our access to public websites from our main unclassified system,” said one senior State Department official, adding that the department expected its systems to be up soon. ....The breach at the White House was believed to be the work of hackers in Russia, while the breaches at NOAA and the Postal Service were believed to the work of hackers inside China. Attributing attacks to a group or nation is difficult because hackers typically tend to route their attack through compromised web servers all over the world. A senior State Department official said the breach was discovered after “activity of concern” was detected on portions of its unclassified computer system. Officials did not say how long hackers may have been lurking in those systems, but security improvements were being added to them on Sunday.
> but to think that the U.S. government wouldn't be able to secure its networks, and that only the Chinese and Russians would be trying to "get in", is ridiculous.
For $5000, you can buy a heavy safe made of concrete and steel. For $32, I can rent a concrete saw made to cut concrete and steel. You can't secure ANYTHING and have it still be useful. The question is "how hard should it be to breqk in?" The state department network should be pretty hard to breqk into. It'll never, ever be impossible.
The government of China isn't stupid. They know that if you are going to have a military and be a world power, it makes sense to also have significant cyber resources - so they do. They use them regularly, especially since the US allows it. The US doesn't respond to cyber attacks the same way they'd respond to physical attacks.