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http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/05pentagon-hacker.html
March 5, 1999
Computer Hackers Are Stopped; Pentagon Networks Were Victim
By ELIZABETH BECKER
WASHINGTON -- Military security analysts uncovered and stopped computer
hackers who had discovered a new way to attack open Pentagon networks on
the Internet, Pentagon officials said Thursday. In testimony before
Congress last week, John J. Hamre, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said
in a closed-door hearing that this new method had been uncovered by
analysts at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., Defense
Department officials said.
The specialists at Dahlgren found a method to thwart those low-level
probes that differ from the more frequent brutal assaults on security
systems and alerted all the military services to the new problem and a
remedy for it.
"There are literally hundreds of attempts weekly to break into the
computers," a Pentagon spokesman said. "It's constant because there's a
certain cachet to getting into the Pentagon system."
The Pentagon has estimated that 99.95 percent of computer hackers fail to
penetrate beyond the open networks, which contain unclassified material,
and so pose no national security concern.
The most notable example of hackers using this new method occurred in
January when a military computer server near San Antonio was probed for
two days from foreign Web sites. These probes reached only the open
military networks connected to the Internet and it was unclear whether the
probes originated overseas or were merely routed through those sites.
"These hackers try to cover their tracks by initiating the intrusions
through an overseas site that has nothing to do with where the hackers
actually are," the Pentagon spokesman said.
In the last year, each armed service has installed new programs to detect
hackers and to protect sensitive material. As the number of surveillance
programs have increased, so has the number of detections.
These new military computer security officials have said they are fighting
a "cyberwar."
"To them it's a war, but it's like the war on crime or the war on drugs --
it's the information security guys' war," said William Arkin, author of
"The U.S. Military On Line." "But it's not a real war."
-o-
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Received on Thu Mar 11 17:31:57 1999