Chris Brook

Whistle blower website Wikileaks announced Thursday that it would publish nearly 2.5 million e-mails from 680 agencies in Syria over the next two months. In a press release on the organization’s site, Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange claimed “the material is embarrassing to Syria,” and “Syria’s opponents.”

A new Trojan that uploads users’ phonebooks to a remote server is making the rounds, circulating on both Apple’s App Store and the Google Play marketplaces, according to research by Kaspersky Lab posted on the Securelist web site earlier today.

And then there was NASA. Poor NASA. This was a tough year for the formerly high-flying and universally beloved U.S. space agency. Not only has their budget seen deep cuts as the US Government tries to balance its books, but they also celebrated the bitter-sweet final mission of their once marquee Space Shuttle Program.

There are a number of US government branches, offices, and agencies that, by their very nature, have giant targets painted on their computer networks. America’s national library would not seem to be among that lot, but alas, not even the Library of Congress could escape the ire of hackers this year.

Earlier this year the Anonymous hacking collective took credit for knocking offline a couple of sites belonging to the Federal Trade Commission. They claimed that the attack was in retaliation for the U.S.

It’s not always malicious hackers and purported state actors that expose weaknesses in government systems. Sometime it’s other government agencies as well. This was the case when federal watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, audited and subsequently called out the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for its lax IT security practices.

In July of last year, the infamous hacking group LulzSec managed to compromise the websites belonging to the upper house of the United States legislature.