Chinese Military Hacks Pentagon
The Financial Times reports in Chinese military hacked into Pentagon that military systems were compromised in a recent cyber attack:
The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American officials.The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.
Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People's Liberation Army.
One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.
The article goes on to say:
The Pentagon took down the network for more than a week while the attacks continued, and is to conduct a comprehensive diagnosis. “These are multiple wake-up calls stirring us to levels of more aggressive vigilance,” said Richard Lawless, the Pentagon’s top Asia official at the time of the attacks.The Pentagon is still investigating how much data was downloaded, but one person with knowledge of the attack said most of the information was probably “unclassified”. He said the event had forced officials to reconsider the kind of information they send over unsecured e-mail systems.
This isn't the first attack on U.S. government systems by the Chinese. The Bureau of Industry and Security within the U. S. Commerce Department was attacked by Chinese hackers last year to the point where the department decided to replace hardware rather than trust potentially compromised firware.
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