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After years of cyberattacks on the networks of high-profile government targets like the Pentagon, Chinese hackers appear to have turned their attention to far more obscure federal agencies.
Law enforcement and cybersecurity analysts in March detected intrusions on the computer networks of the Government Printing Office and the Government Accountability Office, senior American officials said this week.
The printing office catalogs and publishes information for the White House, Congress and many federal departments and agencies. It also prints passports for the State Department. The accountability office, known as the congressional watchdog, investigates federal spending and the effectiveness of government programs. From the article:
The attacks occurred around the same time Chinese hackers breached the networks of the Office of Personnel Management, which houses the personal information of all federal employees and more detailed information on tens of thousands of employees who have applied for top-secret security clearances.
Some of those networks were so out of date that the hackers seemed confused about how to navigate them, officials said. But the intrusions puzzled American officials because hackers have usually targeted offices that have far more classified information.
It is not clear whether the hackers were operating on behalf of the Chinese government. But the sophisticated nature of the attacks has led some American officials to believe that the government, which often conducts cyberattacks through the military or proxies, played a role.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16 2014, @08:56PM
With a budget in the tens of billions a year, this what the NSA should be spending their money on. Fixing security bugs in common software and hardware is a public good. [wikipedia.org] It may even be the single most economically effective public good that the government can invest in, returning over 100x for each dollar spent.
(Score: 1) by looorg on Wednesday July 16 2014, @10:12PM
Would you download or trust a patch downloaded or delivered from/by the NSA? A lot of people/countries wouldn't.
(Score: 2, Informative) by cyrano on Wednesday July 16 2014, @10:26PM
SElinux is still present in a lot of distro's. And that was developed by... the DOD...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SELinux [wikipedia.org]
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear. - Kali [kali.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16 2014, @11:11PM
I wouldn't now but before they went rogue I would have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17 2014, @03:48AM
> Would you download or trust a patch downloaded or delivered from/by the NSA? A lot of people/countries wouldn't.
Well, now that they ruined their reputation, no.
But it isn't about end-users installing patches from the NSA, but rather them finding holes and instead of hoarding them as zero-days, submitting bug reports to developers. They can certainly do other work too, but there is plenty that doesn't carry a risk of compromise.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16 2014, @11:56PM
Funny thing is the hackers are probably using back doors (put in by the NSA) . Back doors that were revealed to them by their own spies in the NSA.