Security Bullet In
Communiques from the security front, sir
Friday 22 June 2007, 11:10 AM
Pentagon hacked
According to various news reports, including the BBC and Time, the Penatgon was hacked on Wednesday, resulting in Pentagon email being suspended.
"Elements of the... unclassified email system were taken offline yesterday afternoon due to a detected penetration," said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
What's more worrying is that Gates appears not to use email. When asked if his email had been affected, he said:
"I don't do e-mail. I'm a low-tech person."
How on earth does he communicate? There's only a limited amount of stuff you can do over the phone...
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Bit worrying, that, especially on top of the news yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security made 844 slip-ups on security on its computer systems in 2006 and 2005 (see story here: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39287648,00.htm). For instance, the US-VISIT program, used to track foreigners' movements in and out of the country, is said to be as full of holes as a colander.
There have been rumours for a while that hackers have got into US-VISIT. The fear is that if true, it could let terrorists change their status in the database to get free movement in the country. On the other hand, there's the identity theft worry for ordinary people.
It is, of course, impossible to tell what the real situation is -- although given that the hackers are far better motivated and equipped to get in than government employees are to keep them out, we can probably guess.
I was reminded of this last weekend, when I was in the ticket hall at Edinburgh Waverley station trying (and failing) to persuade the machines to sell me a cheap day return to Dalgety Bay (where me and the missus were to go prospecting for radioactive contamination on the beach. Romance? We've got it sorted). As I gave up and went to stand in the queue, I noticed two large boxes balanced on top of one of the machines. They were filled with brand new blank tickets.
I waited for a bit to see if anyone was looking after them, picked up the boxes and went to the nearest desk (marked Closed, but with a bloke behind it). He looked up, clearly preparing to tell me off for daring to want to buy something, but I got in first. "I think these shouldn't be sitting around", I said, dumping them on the counter.
"God." he said. "Am I surprised? God."
There are various ways to parse that statement - and I wish I could give you the exact world-weary, disgusted despair in his voice. I took that as the "Thank you, honest traveller, for saving us from fraud" that I'd been hoping for, and excused myself.
I reckon there were easily 500 tickets there. Given that I'd just paid over a hundred quid for a pair of tickets, and that all I'd need to do would be to thermal-print details onto blanks and swipe some data onto the mag stripes to make them perfect replicas... well, you do the sums.
