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Submission + - UN targeted by Chinese Cyberattack (foxnews.com)

Edgewood_Dirk writes: "The world's most extensive case of cyber-espionage, including attacks on U.S. government and U.N. computers, is set to be revealed Wednesday by online security firm McAfee, and analysts are speculating that China is behind the attacks.

The spying was dubbed "Operation Shady RAT," or "remote access tool" by McAfee — and it led to a massive loss of information that poses a huge economic threat, wrote vice president of threat research Dmitri Alperovitch

"What is happening to all this data—by now reaching petabytes as a whole—is still largely an open question," Alperovitch wrote on a blog detailing the threat. "However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat.""

Comment Re:FUBAR = Normal (Score 1) 147

Firstly, yes, condescension from a sailor to a Marine. Very funny. Why don't you just go back to driving the boat for us? Secondly, the main point I was trying to get across was how slow the US military is to adopt new policies and procedures outside of their normal scope of operations. Primarily in that while yes, we have network technicians, and guys who can do a little packet sniffing, most of their duties are in support of intelligence operations. The gathering and exploitation of data, not overt actions such as electronic attack. Jamming all the WiFi in a town is not the same thing as hacking into the bad guy's machine and stealing his internetz. It'll be a long time before the rank and file have honest to God white hats in uniform. Just so it's more clear that I'm not talking out of my ass, here, I'm a 2671, Middle East Cryptologic Linguist. I'm an intelligence operator who speaks Arabic.

Comment FUBAR = Normal (Score 4, Informative) 147

I'm a currently-serving active duty Marine, and the fact that we're not ready for cyberwarfare is symptomatic of our way of doing things. The problem with the US military changing its ways of doing anything is that if there isn't a group of people already trained for the purpose of that new thing, its not gonna get done. Every Marine/sailor/soldier/airman/coastie has a specific job designation when they join up. They may do certain things outside of their scope at times, but "innovation" isn't commonplace or encouraged. It will be years if not a decade or more before an entirely new MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) is created and a training program implemented for the single purpose of creating "cyber-soldiers". Until that happens, the military will rely on other assets within the federal services, or contractors.

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