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Russia Hacks Pentagon; Shuts Down Joint Chiefs Of Staff Email System

A Russian cyber attack around July 25 shut down the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff’s unclassified email system for 11 days and affected around 4,000 military and civilian personnel who work for the Joint Chiefs. No classified information was taken or put at risk. Only unclassified email accounts were infiltrated.
Lieutenant Colonel Valerie Henderson, Pentagon spokeswoman, told the Daily Mail Online, “Joint Staff unclassified networks for all users are currently down. We continue to identify and mitigate cyber security risks across our networks. With those goals in mind, we have taken the Joint Staff network down and continue to investigate. Our top priority is to restore services as quickly as possible. As a matter of policy and for operational security reasons, we do not comment on the details of cyber incidents or attacks against our networks.”
At a news briefing, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters that the attack did not threaten military operations since it was limited to the unclassified network. Until the system is resolved, the Joint Staff is operating on an alternative, classified system. The network remains offline; it is expected to be back online before the end of the week.
The US military officials believe that the complexity and advanced nature of the hack strongly suggests that state-sponsored Russian hackers were behind the intrusion on sensitive US government computer networks. The Defense Department disclosed the attack shortly after it occurred but only in recent days have investigators traced it to Russia.
“This attack was fairly sophisticated and has the indications . . . of having come from a state actor such as Russia,” said a US official on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigation.
According to NBC, the sophisticated cyber intrusion relied on an automated system to download large amounts of data and distribute it to thousands of different accounts on the Internet. It’s suspected the hackers used encrypted social media accounts to coordinate the attack. According to The Daily Beast, hackers broke into unclassified email networks by sending emails that initially seemed legitimate, but ended up being malware or ‘spear phishing‘ attempts.
In April, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter had confirmed that Russian hackers had briefly broken into the Pentagon’s unclassified networks. The hackers, believed to have Moscow backing, penetrated both the State Department and White House networks in October 2014. US President Barack Obama’s personal schedule was among the sensitive data that was compromised.
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