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60 Minutes - Cyber War...Anyone See This?


Will Chen

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Man this was some scary stuff. According to Jim Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 2007 we had an extremely serious breach which would constitute an act of war...if we only knew who the attacker was:

 

"Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don't know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information."

 

It is believed that Brazil has been the subject of cyber attacks which have knocked out their power grid and the story went on to discuss how venerable the US power grid is and how a well planned attack could start a domino effect which could wipe out the entire west coast.

 

Very scary stuff.

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/06/60minutes/main5555565.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody

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Reading on...

 

 

Last November, someone was able to get past the firewalls and encryption devices of one of the most sensitive U.S. military computer systems and stay inside for several days.


"This was the CENTCOM network," Lewis explained. "The command that's fighting our two wars. And some foreign power was able to get into their networks. And sit there and see everything they did. That was a major problem. And that's really had a big effect on D.O.D."


Asked what he meant by "sit there," Lewis said, "They could see what the traffic was. They could read documents. They could interfere with things. It was like they were part of the American military command."


Lewis believes it was done by foreign spies who left corrupted thumbnail drives or memory sticks lying around in places where U.S. military personnel were likely to pick them up. As soon as someone inserted one into a CENTCOM computer, a malicious code opened a backdoor for the foreign power to get into the system.


Lewis said the Pentagon has now banned thumbnail drives.

 

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The cyber war thing was interesting, but basically a rehash of old news...Anything is hackable..still scary though..

 

I would caulk the USB ports closed, and super glue the ones needed for KB/Mouse..:)

 

I worry that the Predators and Raptors are gonna get hijacked and turn in on our guys/gals..

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