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.

Comments

If you can't figure out...

[Razed By TV]

...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.

Re:It probably IS the NSA

[rmdingler]

If you've lived in the U.S. long enough, you may find yourself of the opinion that the real enemies of the state are in Congress.

Re:Clearly these hackers just need jobs!!!

[ScentCone]

Mr. Laden didn't carry out the attacks himself: he got grunts to it.

Yeah, he conned a bunch of uneducated, down-on-their-luck grunts into abandoning their personal sense of decency and agreeing to kill thousands of people - not because their religious convictions told them it was the right thing to do, but because ... they just couldn't find work?

That must have been the case with "grunts" like Mohamed Atta, right? Totally uneducated. Well, except for going to college to study architecture, and spending time at the Technical University of Hamburg. You know where he met with other poor grunts who could only afford to do things like fly back and forth between Germany and various middle eastern destinations, spend time training in Afghanistan, and so on. He traveled to Spain for some meetings, then - the poor, uneducated, desperate guy! - flew to Maryland, where he met up with fellow grunt Hani Hanjour, then off to other destinations where the fellow grunts were living in various states of perfectly comfortable. They didn't just round up some scruffy guys from some poverty-stricken village in the desert and talk them into this because they had no options. These were people who were dedicated to the world view preached by Bin Laden and their intellectual fellows in the Taliban. Focusing on the leaders IS important, because it's what they say and stand for that thousands and thousands of their compatriots - including those living comfortably in western nations, where they've been educated and employed - find agreeable enough to follow.

This whole notion that the guys running, say, the media production facilities, newsletter operations, and logistics for groups like ISIS as they line up insufficiently hardline Muslims and of course western hostages out of whom they can't squeeze enough cash, and lop off their heads or burn them alive ... that the guys doing that are doing so because they're not happy with the local employment prospects ... that would be really funny if it weren't so dark and just plain evil. Not enough schools? Of course not! These are the people who are dragging the teachers out into the street and shooting them in the head before they burn down the schools. The problem isn't lack of foreign investment, it's cultural rot in the form of their local religion crashing headlong into the rest of the world's more contemporary ways of life. These guys don't want modern jobs, they want medieval jobs.