My partners and I have been around the block w/ some Turkish hackers in the past and even involved the FBI once during a pretty persistent onslaught and I walked away from that experience pretty impressed with their hacking talents.
Defacing websites and planting rootkits on commercial servers is one thing but hacking into anything belonging to the United States Military is another story altogether. This is an embarrassment and it should make some people drawing a government salary a little bit on edge today. Our government should not stop looking into this breach until they have first apprehended the hacker cell completely and cut off their arms (they are in Turkey after all, this should be okay there), and secondly they should put into place a team of established hackers like Kevin Mitnick, and some of the better ones that have never been caught, and pay them the big bucks to just sit around and try to wiggle their way into our stuff everyday and provide intelligence as to how these things go down.
Here is the story from WHIR about the breach: (and by the way, yes this is the same group that defaced the United Nations website back in 2007)
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — An anti-American group of hackershave broken into at least two of the US Army’s critical web servers, according to an exclusive report by InformationWeek. Despite the advanced security and antivirus software the Defense department’s has in place, the hackers were able to breach the servers.
The hackers are based in Turkey, which is known to have ties to the al-Qaida network. However, it is still unclear if the group is affiliated in any way with the notorious terrorist organization. The attacks are currently being investigated by the Department of Defense and the US Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Office and Computer Emergency Response Team.
The group, who call themselves the "m0sted", broke into servers at the Army’s McAlester Ammunition Plant in McAlester, Oklahoma on January 26, and previously at the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Transatlantic Center in Winchester, Virginia on September 19, 2007.
In the case of the McAlester Ammunitions plant breach, visitors who were trying to access the plant’s website found themselves redirected to a page that featured a m0sted-led protest against climate change. In the Army Corps of Engineers’ attack, the hackers sent website vistorsto www.m0sted.net, which at the time contained anti-American and anti-Israeli messages and images.
The site is currently a parked domain page with airline reservation links. It is still not clear as to whether the hackers managed to steal any sensitive data from the Army’s servers.
So far, officials have followed through with records search warrants against Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, as well as other Internet and email service firms in their ongoing efforts to discover the hackers’ true identities.
According to officials, the hackers broke into the web servers by using an SQL injection where they successfully exploited a security vulnerability in Microsoft’s SQL Server database.
In the past, the hackers performed similar attacks on many other websites, including an attack in July 2008 against a site operated by international computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.
Hackers Break Into US Army Servers – Web Hosting Industry News | Daily Web Hosting News and Web Host Interviews
Questions or Comments?