Report: White House e-mail system attacked
It was revealed this week that the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain were hacked over the summer. Now, a report has surfaced that the White House has suffered multiple attacks in recent months as well.
According to a story by the Financial Times on Friday, U.S. officials have confirmed that the White House e-mail archives were attacked several times in recent months. The report says the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, a new unit established in 2007 to tackle cybersecurity, detected the attacks on the White House, and also traced the attacks back to servers based in China.
The quoted source said each time the attack was detected, new defenses were put in place. "It is constant cat and mouse."
Overall, the attackers apparently only had access to the unclassified White House computer network. Nonetheless, the data could still have value.
The unnamed official quoted within the report speculated that the cyberattacks might follow the "grain of sands" approach used by Chinese intelligence. That involves parsing through often low-level information to find a few nuggets.
As CNET's resident security expert, Robert Vamosi has been interviewed on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets to share his knowledge about the latest online threats and to offer advice on personal and corporate security. Listen to his podcast at securitybites.cnet.com or e-mail Robert with your questions and comments. 




Hackers find missing Whitehouse e-mails and post them on Wikileaks.
Thank whatever deity you worship that we have a chance to save ourselves from fuhrer bushit's messes.
- by Louise_V November 10, 2008 6:46 AM PST
- When will politicians learn that if they want their emails private, they have to protect their passwords!? : )
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(14 Comments)Here is a blogpost from our blog (Passpack - online password manager):
http://tinyurl.com/3nckxn
I wrote it shortly after the Palin password hack - and some tips on how to help prevent this sort of thing for politicians and non-politicians alike.
Louise
Louise