Pentagon E-mail System HACKED

The Pentagon got owned pretty hard with 1,500 accounts being taken offline due to a hack attack. For once however they did admit the incident and didn’t try to cover it over or brush it off.

I guess the amount of attacks they get is exponentially more than other networks…but still, I would have thought they should be super secure.

About 1,500 unclassified e-mail users at the Pentagon had their service disrupted yesterday when a hacker infiltrated the e-mail system, forcing the accounts to be taken offline.

In a briefing today with reporters in Washington at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates confirmed the incident and said that the users were disconnected from the system after the intrusion was discovered.

“The reality is that the Defense Department is constantly under attack,” Gates said during the briefing. “Elements of the [Office of the Secretary of Defense] unclassified e-mail system were taken offline yesterday afternoon, due to a detected penetration. A variety of precautionary measures are being taken. We expect the system to be online again very soon.”

The funny thing is the Secretary of Defense himself doesn’t even use e-mail…so I doubt he even noticed what had happened.

Hopefully the government will sharpen up it’s ideas.

Gates said that he was not sure why the 1,500 users were removed temporarily from the system. “Well, I don’t know the answer to that, and they’re still investigating it.”

Gates said he doesn’t use e-mail, so he didn’t know if his account was affected.

“I don’t do e-mail,” he said. “I’m a very low-tech person.”

A spokesman at the Department of Defense late this afternoon said he had no additional information about the incident.

 

Attack on root server and internet traffic

The attack, which began Tuesday at about 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, was the most significant attack against the root servers since an October 2002 distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, said Ben Petro, senior vice president of services with Internet service provider Neustar. Root servers manage the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), used to translate Web addresses such as Amazon.com into the numerical IP addresses used by machines.

“Two of the root servers suffered badly, although they did not completely crash; some of the others also saw heavy traffic,” said John Crain, chief technical officer with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in an e-mail interview

The two hardest-hit servers are maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense and ICANN, he added.

The botnet briefly overwhelmed these servers with useless requests, causing them to occasionally hang, but did not disrupt Internet service, Petro said. By 10:30 a.m., Internet service providers were able to filter enough of the traffic from the botnet machines that traffic to and from the root servers was essentially back to normal.

The attack wasn’t that strong and they managed to filter it out, it was in terms of MB rather than GB frequently seen in modern DDoS attacks.

This is the heavy attack and the most significant in the past 5 years or so.

The every biggest attack in root servers is on 21st Oct 2002 full report of that is available here.