British military hit with cyberattacks

The British Ministry of Defence is currently coping with a cyberattack that has managed to redirect e-mails from multiple Royal Air Force facilities to computers inside Russia, according to a report from Military.com's DefenseTech blog. The attack, which took the form of an e-mail worm, is reported to have driven MOD officials to shut down all e-mail for a period earlier this week.

The attack comes on the heels of a malware attack on the U.S. Department of Defense's networks late last year, as reported here. That attack led to the temporary ban on removable media such as USB “thumb drives,” which were an alleged culprit in the attacks.

A spokesman for Joint Task Force Global Network Operations said that current policy is to require the certification of all storage devices prior to being attached to systems connected to the Global Information Grid.

While there's been no attribution for these attacks, they are part of an escalating cyber war being waged over the Internet, including Russian “hacktivist” attacks on Estonia and Georgia over the past two years. Hacktivists — politically motivated hackers who may or may not have a state affiliation, but are responding to a particular event — are a growing threat, according to Mark Hall, director of information assurance policy and strategy for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Hall spoke about hacktivists in a presentation at the MILCOM conference in November. “The hacktivist threat is real,” he said. “A nation can influence their activity while also denying culpability. We haven't seen any sort of restraint in these communities to keep them from carrying out these attacks.”

Posted by Sean Gallagher on Jan 22, 2009 at 8:12 AM