Great! The existential importance of the choices we make on November 8th becomes more evident every day.

Via Motherboard.

The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard.

The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for more than a year infiltrated the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM. In the process, they stole highly sensitive data about several millions of government workers and even spies.

In the alert, the FBI lists a long series of websites used as command and control servers to launch phishing attacks “in furtherance of computer network exploitation (CNE) activities [read: hacking] in the United States and abroad since at least 2011.”

“Looks like they were in for years before they were caught, god knows where they are,” Michael Adams, an information security expert who served more than two decades in the US Special Operations Command, and who has reviewed the alert, told Motherboard. “Anybody who’s been in that network all this long, they could be anywhere and everywhere.”

For Adams, this alert shows that the US government still is not in control of what’s going on inside its most sensitive networks. This alert, he said, is an admission of that.

“It’s just flabbergasting,” he told me. “How many times can this keep happening before we finally realize we’re screwed?”

Do read the whole report.

***************************************************




This section is for comments from tammybruce.com's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Tammy agrees with or endorses any particular comment just because she lets it stand.

You must be logged in to post a comment.