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US State Department Can't Get Rid of Email Hackers
An anonymous reader sends this quote from a Wall Street Journal report:
Three months after the State Department confirmed hackers breached its unclassified email system, the government still hasn't been able to evict them from the network, say three people familiar with the investigation. Government officials, assisted by outside contractors and the National Security Agency, have repeatedly scanned the network and taken some systems offline. But investigators still see signs of the hackers on State Department computers, the people familiar with the matter said. Each time investigators find a hacker tool and block it, these people said, the intruders tweak it slightly to attempt to sneak past defenses. It isn't clear how much data the hackers have taken, the people said. They reaffirmed what the State Department said in November: that the hackers appear to have access only to unclassified email. Still, unclassified material can contain sensitive intelligence.
Isn't asking the NSA to secure your system like asking the fox to check the barbed wire fence around the henhouse?
... or is that 'too nuanced’ of an explanation?
Maybe we just can't clean our way out of these attacks?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Those Researchers are such rascals!
Today I was watching a virus infected machine call home to Haliburton's network.
Does 'Unclassified' is this context mean not yet given a class, or is it the same as 'declassified'?
Make every emails classified. Even emails from little timmy who asked if you've seen his dog.
let's all celebrate!
it's a tempest party and i can cry if i want to cry if i want to
Unclassified implies something was and is still public.
Declassified implies something was private, but the classification has been reversed and the thing is now unclassified.
...how to get them off of your network, then I don't think I'd trust you to accurately determine what the hackers have and haven't accessed.
"Each time investigators find a hacker tool and block it [...] the intruders tweak it slightly to attempt to sneak past defenses"
Far be it from me to lecture the NSA and "outside contractors" about security, but doesn't that suggest they're taking a black-list approach, rather than identifying the security hole that the hacker tool exploited in the first place?
Then you can't even wipe ass correctly... What makes them think they are >Hackers? LOLOLOLOL Dream on Gov-Goons... Didn't Momma Teach you Boys that "There is ALWAYS somebody better!"
The US may have to allow more immigrants in order to be competitive with China and perhaps other populous countries in a potential cyber-war. It's more or less a game of man-power. Either that, you siphon techies off of other fields. Maybe the "secret plan" is to send all non-military IT work to India, freeing the rest to be cyber warriors? Our trade deficit will be Jupiter-sized, though.
Table-ized A.I.
Hellooooooooo NSA! Do you like having a taste of your own medicine?
This is the future, people. Hack and counter-hack. Ad infinitum. In other words, bleak and without hope.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Keep up the scare words, people. More empty scare words that really only say "O HAI I DUNNO WAT I R SAIN ROFLCOPTERBBQ", because that shows how knowledgeable you are with this intarwebz security thing.
The NSA, which specializes in Advanced persistent threats should be able to give you the same advice any Security pro would.
Wipe everything and start over. Trying to play catch up with hackers is a losing game, especially since the network is so compromised they can just recompile and inject new malware/rootkits/etc. into the network.
Call up Dell or HP, replace all your servers with new ones and decommission the old ones. There will never be a time when you can say you are 100% recovered if you are using the same servers and software.
Sucks it's your email but management needs to buck up and do the right thing here.
Assuming its not actually one of their own employees/consultants helping re-infect the systems maybe one or more of these fairly common situations applies:
* Using Cisco routers with default configurations and firmware that hasn't been updated in years...
* Using unencrypted, plain text authentication for systems instead of public key auth...
* No password strength standards (some employees predictably using "911" or "123456" for their passwords)
* Employees allowed to re-use the same passwords after the supposed "clean sweep"
* Windows filesharing services
* Wireless networking at all, or possibly using WEP or even completely open
* Microsoft office documents from outside sources
* HP printers, or really any network/wifi enabled printers
* That one old Windows XP box nobody is allowed to reformat clean because its "mission critical"
* Employees are allowed to bring in their own laptops/cellphones and other usb/bluetooth/wifi enabled devices
Did I miss anything? Anyone else seen this crap enough times to know the intrusion vector is probably nothing highly advanced or original?
If they had more employment opportunities, they wouldn't hack! The State Department can’t focus on finding the hackers and they should be helping them find work. The State Department needs to get to the root cause of hacking, which includes “lack of opportunity for jobs.”
This article and the PR folks for the government presume or falsely claim there is a different system for unclassified email as classified email. If so, why doesn't the government use the classified methodology for unclassified messages starting tomorrow?
The fact is even the classified system uses about the same hardware and services. It might have some additional encryption, that as we all know have already been breached by "five eyes". Based on what we have seen there are at least six.
Simple solution...
Get rid of Windows based systems.
Did I miss anything?
The massive slashdot paradox in this thread? - In other stories the NSA are seen as omnipotent hackers who know more about me than my closest friends, but in this thread they suddenly don't know their arse from their elbow?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I think its more accurate to say "The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing."
The nice folks over at NSA have been compromising networks operated by State for many, many years.
There's no paradox.
When you have a budget of millions of dollars AND practically unrestricted access to everyone's Internet transmissions then it is a lot easier to appear to be "omnipotent" in your ATTACKS.
But DEFENSE is a lot more difficult.
Who are the hackers? The United States Federal Government (NSA, CIA, etc). No mystery. You're biting youself and getting sick; bruch your own teeth. Seriously, the climate of paranoia and total espianage that is Uncle Sam today promotes hacking everyone, including "youself". If the Pentagon is encouraged to hack the German State Department, why shouldn't it hack the U.S. State department while it's at it? Sure, Germany is supposed to be an ally, and the US is supposed to be an ally, but Uncle Sam hacks allies already. If eveywhere, why not here?
What comes around, goes around (or vice versa).
Pay the price.
... Manning and Snowden.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The NSA is not charged with defending the government from hackers.
The NSA is fucked up already ... let's not give them more stuff to fuck up.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
They're just falling victim to the same mistake in reasoning that leads people to hate "Congress:" Namely that congress is not a monolithic entity. And neither is the NSA. There are three branches and the completely insane SIGINT maniacs, who are apparently bound and determined to make sure nobody ever trusts American hardware again, are only one of them.
That, and as the NSA are doubtlessly aware, this particular game is horrifyingly stacked against the defenders: You have to be perfect, unfailingly, every single time. If they get lucky once, the whole network the team has spent hours or days cleaning is screwed again, possibly literally in a matter of seconds.
*snert* captcha is "inspects"!
This is the same government we trust with our healthcare data which on the black market is worth much more than verified usable credit card data?
I'm no conspiricay theorist, but as many in government have said "Let no crisis go to waste". I suspect they will use this and other examples to advocate more government control over the internet in the name of "national security". Because regulation will do so much more than hiring people who know how to properly secure a network...
US State department cannot get rid of the ultimate hackers and never will -- their rivals for taxpayer dollars at the NSA.
I was not just talking 911, but also Bin Laden's followers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I feel my position has been twisted to be mostly about 911, when in fact 911 is a drop in the bucket. The education visa issue probably tilts "immigrant" terrorist statistics, as mentioned in a nearby message.
Information on the education and goals of TYPICAL terrorists and extremists is still fuzzy, at least as given here. The above is merely speculation based on an insufficient sample size (including lack of samples from other countries).
Table-ized A.I.