Alleged NASA hacker loses extradition ruling

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Staggering incompetence shown by the US military

The US military have egg all over their faces - of course there will be baying for blood. Who knows how many undiscovered hackers - REAL terrorists - were able to slice into the US military systems with the ease of a hot knife into butter. What a jaw dropping exhibition of US military incompetence.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-965490.html?tag=nl
"In May of last year, government contractor Exigent International acknowledged that one or more hackers broke into a government server that contained satellite software and stole code. Evidence led investigators to an e-mail service in Sweden, where the hackers apparently stashed the code. The culprits were never apprehended"

Oooops! Those US miltary systems sure ain't very secure!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon
"At the Infosecurity Europe 2006 conference in London on April 27, 2006, McKinnon appeared on the Hackers' Panel. When asked how his exploits were first discovered, McKinnon answered that he'd miscalculated the timezone ? he was using remote-control software to operate a Windows computer while its user was sitting in front of it"

Remotely controlling a Windows computer? Good heavens, is that how easy it is for terrorists to compromise US military security? Do we hear am outcry about Windows security drop offs? No? Whyever not? COuld it be everyone is too busy installing the very latest (until next week) critical security patches?


http://news.com.com/Gary+McKinnon+Scapegoat+or+public+enemy/2008-7350_3-5786782.html
"The unemployed UFO enthusiast was, metaphorically speaking, able to walk right in, look around and make himself at home in what are supposedly some of the most secure systems in the world. Although breaking into the Department of Defense required a combination of ingenuity and hours of mindless drudgery, ultimately, McKinnon says, it was the "dangerously lax IT systems" that made it possible, he claims".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4977134.stm
Did it worry you, this lack of protection for systems?
McKinnon: I was always very frightened when I realized there were always other people from all over the world on there. These were like foreign ISPs, routinely going through things. It is very worrying that it is the world's only superpower, and it is that easy to breach security.

No outcry about incompetent US sys admins, then?

"SK: How did you go about trying to find the stuff you were looking for in Nasa, in the Department of Defense?

GM: Unlike the press would have you believe, it wasn't very clever. I searched for blank passwords, I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people's programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes.

SK: So you're saying that you found computers which had a high-ranking status, administrator status, which hadn't had their passwords set - they were still set to default?

GM: Yes, precisely.

SK: Were you the only hacker to make it past the slightly lower-than-expected lines of defence?

GM: Yes, exactly, there were no lines of defence. There was a permanent tenancy of foreign hackers. You could run a command when you were on the machine that showed connections from all over the world, check the IP address to see if it was another military base or whatever, and it wasn't.

The General Accounting Office in America has again published another damning report saying that federal security is very, very poor"

Posted by: whisperycat   Posted on: 05/10/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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