About
"Distrust and caution are the parents of security" - Benjamin Franklin
A
congressional investigation was launched after hackers compromised a number of
Homeland Security computers and transferred sensitive data to several Chinese
language Web sites. The investigation deemed that Unisys, a government
contractor that had been hired to secure the department’s systems, was
responsible for the intrusions.
Starting in 1998,
U.S. government officials began noticing a pattern of probes into various
government networks, including the Pentagon, NASA, universities, research
institutions and the Department of Energy. Evidently, hackers – believed to be
located in Russia – had compromised these networks and left backdoors through
which they could secretly slip at a later time. The targets of these intrusions
were mostly unclassified but sensitive information such as military hardware
design plans, maps of military bases, and troop arrangements.
Then-U.S.
Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III called it “the most significant
breach of U.S. military computers ever” and “a network administrator’s worst
fear” when, in 2008, a silently operating, rogue program infiltrated classified
U.S. military networks.
For more than a year between February
of 2001 and March of 2002, a British national, Gary McKinnon, was allegedly able
to hack into nearly 100 United States military and NASA computers.
The
Department of Veterans Affairs was hit on two separate occasions by breaches in
2006. 26.5 million Veterans and their families had their names, Social Security
numbers and dates of birth lifted after a laptop was swiped from an employee’s home in May.
Even before
the Internet was “the Internet,” it was a breeding ground for worms that could
spread between loosely protected and networked machines. One of the first of
its kind, the now famous Morris worm, spread across the world over ARPANET, a
progenitor to the modern Internet designed by what was then the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) for the Department of Defense.
Nearly three months after marketing services firm Epsilon had its system breached, the company has begun to rebuild the security of its e-mail marketing platform.
While this spring’s PlayStation Network hack was certainly massive, a new infographic from Veracode illustrates just how sprawling the attack really was. The graphic traces the breach back to April’s “external intrusion” and eventual shuttering of Sony’s online gaming
network along with the subsequent hack of Sonypictures.com.
UPDATE: An Internet Service Provider outage, not hackers, was to blame for the unavailability of MasterCard’s website early Tuesday morning according to a statement from a company spokesman.
With the release of Firefox 5 earlier this week, Mozilla has finally added its Do Not Track privacy feature to the company’s flagship browser. The feature, aimed at customizing how users browsing behavior is tracked is the first of its kind that can be implemented across multiple platforms, including Android phones, according to a post on the Mozilla Blog on Tuesday.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
