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.

[Brandonius Maximus]

Grains of sand.

[globalist_agenda]

Bush always said, "We must not be iso-lationist".

[solitare_pax]

And here I thought Democrat and Republican minions alike always used free internet e-mail services like Yahoo and gmail to avoid unnecessary work by their IT staff and frivolous inquiries and lawsuits from those who want to know what they are _REALLY_ up to.

[n3td3v]

these reports have been coming out in floods since obama got in because marcus sachs and the cia want to influence the next administration as they are coming in and 100 days after. http://youtube.com/watch?v=FSUPTZVlkyU

[mcswell]

Hope they didn't find out about Stargate.

[burnttoast1]

It's the fargate not the stargate, we are not getting sued!

[superPatriot]

give me a visa and a passport, and I will put an end to it lol

[inthisstyle]

Borrow Sarah Palin's; she doesn't need it.

Next headline:

Hackers find missing Whitehouse e-mails and post them on Wikileaks.

[n3td3v]

"CIA hackers post missing Whitehouse e-mails on Wikileaks" made to look like Chinese hackers.

[Dalkorian]

Doubtful, but I'll put money on the fact that fuhrer bushit will use this as an excuse. "We can't produce the missing emails because the Chinese hacked our servers."

Thank whatever deity you worship that we have a chance to save ourselves from fuhrer bushit's messes.

[aspolicastro]

It's just a matter of time before a group of hackers are organized enough, funded enough and bold enough to take out one of the US major infrastructure like the power grid or communications. Based on years of research into hacker activities I have written a thriller with similar scenarios called Dark End of the Spectrum. Some of my scenarios are based on actual events. Check it out at http://stores.lulu.com/aspnovelist

[sshtdifferentday]

So are you ripping off Die Hard 4?

[Louise_V]

When will politicians learn that if they want their emails private, they have to protect their passwords!? : )
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