FBI sends memo to US.gov sysadmins: You've been hacked... for the past YEAR Hacktivists allegedly affiliated with Anonymous have been covertly breaking into US government systems and pilfering sensitive information for nearly a year, the FBI warned last week. The attacks (which began last December and are thought to be ongoing) exploit flaws in Adobe's ColdFusion web app development software to plant …
"exploit flaws in Adobe's ColdFusion web app development software"
Well at least adobe jumped right on it and issued a fix!
"which began last December and are thought to be ongoing"
Well... err... At least it didn't affect any of the properly protected government sites!
"10 attacks against US government systems, eight of which are blamed on ColdFusion exploits"
OH! Err... at least third party anti-malware/ exploit software vendors caught it!
(Qaz knows, they charge enough for the protection they provide!)
"the breaches have been publicised by Anonymous under the a campaign dubbed Operation Last Resort"
OK, Er... I'll shut up now! :/
What really drives me nuts about this sort of thing is that the Feds often know what's going on, but don't say anything until they've milked every advantage they can from it. They'll watch crime happening, for months or even years until the determine if there's someone they can arrest and successfully prosecute. It's like letting a forest fire burn because there's a patch of poison ivy there.
One of our clients manages several DoD projects and they were hacked a few years ago. When the Feds came to tell him they also told him he'd been under attack for months but they didn't tell him so they could monitor everything and catch the infiltrators. Once they identified the perpetrators as being in an uncooperative country thus out of their reach, they decided to tell him about the breach.
A lot of taxpayer money was lost because there were doubts about what all had been compromised so projects, or large portions of them were scrapped or reworked. Stuff like that drives me crazy.
I'm going to make a gardening analogy to explain my position : if you have dandelions in your lawn, it's useless to just cut off the head - you need to dig out the root to put an end to it.
Similarly, from the FBI point of view, it may actually be justifiable to let crime continue until you can nail down the entity that is actually responsible for the actions, not just grab the thug doing the job. This supposes, of course, that it is a known fact that the thug is not acting on his own, and that the entity he his taking jobs from is worth pursuing.
I doubt that it takes months to check if illegal net activity comes from inside the country or outside, though, and it seems to me that, if it comes from outside, there's no reason not to come foreward about it.
It's not like the FBI can go arrest someone in another country, right ? Not yet, at least.
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As I recall, the alternative was putting Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from personally commanding thousands of nuclear weapons. After that, your alternative was placing one of the most openly bigoted socipaths America has ever produced in the same position. (Pretty boy, not Cheney...though the Dark Lord did just wonders for your economy, didn't he?)
I'm not saying the Obumbler is fantabulous...but the available alternatives weren't merely disastrous, there were cataclysmic. Literally. Planetary cataclysm avoided with Palin and social cataclysm avoided with Ryan.
"What party politics? I'm Canadian. I have no "party" within the US. They're all bloody nuts, but some have recently been demonstrably more nuts than others."
Indeed.
Time was you only had to know about the religious nut jobs.
Now you have the Swivel Eyed Loons of the "Tea Party," with their Trotsky style infiltration tactics. I'm sure US readers can identify other types for whom their prime "candidacy" should be that of a room with mattress wallpaper.
I think it was actually Richard Condon in The Manchurian Candidate (which is actually more a political satire and black comedy than a thriller) who noted politics is about who you get to do it to you, about 30 years before Douglas Adams.
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