State Department Hacked During Showdown With North Korea
Wow, this is a huge problem. With North Korea fueling rockets and missiles and aiming them at the United States, the State Department was offline and maggoty with hackers installing backdoor systems. To prevent further compromise, State Department Cyber Folks had to make a tough decision and disconnect protocols and networks from the Internet, disabling and crippling their own network.
People, this lack of security at the State Department has put lives at stake. I used to work at the State Department years ago during the Clinton Administration. At that time, I was appalled at how lax their internet security was. They had outdated firewalls, no Intrusion Detection systems, and refused to filter most internet traffic. The State Department was running under an open policy comparable to most universities! They would rather allow anything in and out than risk preventing a diplomat in the field from retrieving email.
Apparently, they havent changed much. Lax security has screwed efforts to keep us safe, thus screwing American efforts in the Pacific.
State Dept. Suffers Computer Break-Ins
The State Department is recovering from large-scale computer break-ins worldwide over the past several weeks that appeared to target its headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, The Associated Press has learned.
Investigators believe hackers stole sensitive U.S. information and passwords and implanted backdoors in unclassified government computers to allow them to return at will, said U.S. officials familiar with the hacking. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the widespread intrusions and the resulting investigation.
The break-ins and the State Department’s emergency response severely limited Internet access at many locations, including some headquarters offices in Washington, these officials said. Internet connections have been restored across nearly all the department since the break-ins were recognized in mid-June.
After the State Department break-ins, many employees were instructed to change their passwords. The department also temporarily disabled a technology known as secure sockets layer, used to transmit encrypted information over the Internet. Hackers can exploit weaknesses in this technology to break into computers, and they can use the same technology to transmit stolen information covertly off a victim’s network.
The part about the Secure Sockets Layer is SSL, used whenever people do online banking. This was an idiotic response to this problem, but because the State Department has never practiced good point to point security, and has not implemented a good VPN solution, this may have been the only option to block traffic going in and out of the Department in encrypted format.
This story also exposes some very real weaknesses in the way that the State runs its cyber security. Many American companies restrict access to their systems from European and Asian countries to prevent the worst of the hackers out there. But not the State. They are apparently wide open to everyone.
This may be, in my opinion, the most egregious and dangerous breach of cyber security in American government systems.
The problem is that elitists infest the State Department, and they run the cyber security like a college dorm room, as if everyone was still in an Ivy League School. North Korea is reported to have small cyber warfare teams, but this is most likely the Chicoms behind this breach.
There is a lot of information that can be gathered from the unclassified systems there to paint a really good picture of what US intentions are…
Not just for North Korean policies, but more mundane things too, like how we intend to respond to overfishing, dealings with Taiwan and more.