Russia Hacks Pentagon; Shuts Down Joint Chiefs Of Staff Email System

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A Russian cyber attack around July 25 shut down the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff’s unclassified email system for 11 days and affected around 4,000 military and civilian personnel who work for the Joint Chiefs. No classified information was taken or put at risk. Only unclassified email accounts were infiltrated.

Lieutenant Colonel Valerie Henderson, Pentagon spokeswoman, told the Daily Mail Online, Joint Staff unclassified networks for all users are currently down. We continue to identify and mitigate cyber security risks across our networks. With those goals in mind, we have taken the Joint Staff network down and continue to investigate. Our top priority is to restore services as quickly as possible. As a matter of policy and for operational security reasons, we do not comment on the details of cyber incidents or attacks against our networks.”

At a news briefing, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters that the attack did not threaten military operations since it was limited to the unclassified network. Until the system is resolved, the Joint Staff is operating on an alternative, classified system. The network remains offline; it is expected to be back online before the end of the week.

The US military officials believe that the complexity and advanced nature of the hack strongly suggests that state-sponsored Russian hackers were behind the intrusion on sensitive US government computer networks. The Defense Department disclosed the attack shortly after it occurred but only in recent days have investigators traced it to Russia.

This attack was fairly sophisticated and has the indications . . . of having come from a state actor such as Russia,” said a US official on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigation.

According to NBC, the sophisticated cyber intrusion relied on an automated system to download large amounts of data and distribute it to thousands of different accounts on the Internet. It’s suspected the hackers used encrypted social media accounts to coordinate the attack. According to The Daily Beast, hackers broke into unclassified email networks by sending emails that initially seemed legitimate, but ended up being malware or ‘spear phishing‘ attempts.

In April, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter had confirmed that Russian hackers had briefly broken into the Pentagon’s unclassified networks. The hackers, believed to have Moscow backing, penetrated both the State Department and White House networks in October 2014. US President Barack Obama’s personal schedule was among the sensitive data that was compromised.

 


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5 COMMENTS

  1. The way this message is brought i find it confusing.

    this would make russia so called suspicious, there just trying to give russia an even more bad name !! because allready with this mh 17 bullcrap that they supposed to be the guilty one,s while the real critics allready have proven that is was ukraine !!! With the help of my own fucked up government , the Netherlands !!!

    i wont believe that russia hacked the us joint chiefs of staff unless they come out and admit it because russia has seriously nothing to gain with these so called attempted hacks !

    • Well said Eric…as anon would know the first thing about hacking, it to cover your tracks, so the originating attacker is not traceable….

  2. the news is very vague… they don’t have clear indication of who hacked! I can easily be China, or any loner hacker himself (remember when Julian Assange hacked into Pentagon for 2 years?)!

  3. So, the unclassified email accounts that are linked to the Pentagon were compromised by Spear Phishing???? xD

    There really is no patch for human error…

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