Friday, June 17, 2011

The Cuckoo's Egg Hatched Again - 3

This series of Dredd Blog posts has dealt with various hacking phenomena.

The government, speaking through Leon Panetta, testified before the U.S. Congress that the next "Pearl Harbor" would likely be a cyber attack.

The meaning of cyber attack is essentially the same as a hack of some sort, so it is somewhat surprising that a hack took place against the CIA, which Panetta directs, very close in time to the statement Panetta made at his hearing describing "a new Pearl Harbor" cyber attack.

The British press is reporting a hack into the Central Intelligence Agency's website that took place mid-week:
The CIA has become the latest target of self-styled "pirate ninja" hackers LulzSec.

The Central Intelligence Agency website was unavailable for a few minutes on Wednesday evening as the group announced the attack via Twitter: "Tango down – cia.gov – for the lulz".

"We are looking into these reports," a CIA spokeswoman said.

The hackers, who describe themselves as "the world's leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense", have gained international notoriety this month with a series of security breaches.

Over the weekend LulzSec broke into a public website of the US Senate and released data stolen from the legislative body's computer servers.

Last week they hacked the website of an unnamed NHS organisation – one of England's primary care trusts. The Department of Health said no patient's medical records were accessed during the incident, which it described it as "a local issue" and "quite a low-level" lapse in IT security.

Earlier this month LulzSec broke into the website of Sony Pictures Entertainment and exposed information from 37,000 users, including names, passwords, birthdates and email addresses. It also hacked into a webserver belonging to Nintendo in the US.

The name of the group is derived from "LOL" (laugh out loud) and "security".
(Guardian). Let's hope the CIA doesn't use their security quality as a "reason" to restrict the internet, a media they cannot control like they do their main stream media.

The previous post in this series is here.

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