It’s bad enough that military and government computer systems at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were hacked and compromised.
But to add insult to that injury, it appears that they were all hacked by the same person: a teenager thousands of miles away, in Uppsala, Sweden.
It is believed that the teen goes by the hacker name “Stakkato”, and indeed at one of the compromised facilities a researcher got a message from the hacker, identifying themselves as “Stakkato”, and taking responsibility for all three hacks.
Now, if a teenager in Uppsala, Sweden – someone who presumably has no beef, no axe to grind, no bone to pick with the United States, and who probably by definition has no more than a high school education – can hack into computers at NASA, a naval air station, and White Sands Missile Range, for Pete’s sake, what do you think that someone who wants to really do damage to the U.S., and who has sophisticated and advanced knowledge and understanding of computer (and hey, missile) systems can do?
What do you think they have already done.
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That’s kinda scary.
Now, granted, the information which the hacker accessed at White Sands was weather report information, however that information, which is actually mission critical at White Sands, was stored on internal White Sands’ secure computers, so really the type of data accessed doesn’t make the fact of the breach any less serious.
Said a White Sands spokesperson, who would not confirm whether the hack was by the Swedish teen, “We determined it right away, and we fixed it right away. We don’t consider it a breach of sensitive information.”
Whew, I feel much better now.
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Aunty naively believes that the student “presumably has no beef, no axe to grind, no bone to pick with the United States”. Hello? Anybody outside the United States who is *NOT* scaredy of Dubya is living in a cave. (And that doesn’t mean that many of those who live in caves are not particularly scared of what Mr. Right or Wrong, Your Loose Cannon might come up with next.)
I had the same reaction last summer when the DoJ found a bunch of spam zombies at the Department of Defense and and the US Senate. Given that they were probably installed via backdoors created by viruses or trojans, that meant there were a bunch of government computers with backdoors on them.