United States Computer Systems Under Attack, IT Security Lacking

White House emails and networks infiltrated, President elect Obama, and Senator McCain's computers attacked and infiltrated during the summer at least once.

The Chinese have been accused and caught spying on the United States since the early Clinton administration, though nothing has really been done about it.

Little action has been taken to secure the systems, guard information from them, and they are still vulnerable.

The scary part, is apparently the ease with which they were allegedly able to penetrate the systems and this should be a warning to any future candidates running for the office of the President of the United States, and any other people in the Government.

It was recently announced that the World Bank was hacked apparently numerous times as well.

Too many Companies, and Government systems holding sensitive data are unnecessarily vulnerable to outside attack. Placing this data on vulnerable and accessible networks is like leaving the door to the candy store wide open.

Recently, Michael Horowitz had a post on his Defensive Computing blog titled "Some Computers Are Too Important To Be Networked". I highly suggest you read it, and apply its lessons to your computer security plans. It is a short post and well worth reading.

An earlier post I had on this can be found here: Obama and McCain Computers Hacked Over The Summer.

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Source 4 U.S Treasury Hacked
Source 5 World Bank Hacked
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Obama and McCain Computers Hacked Over The Summer

Both Presidential candidates had their computer systems hacked over the summer by what authorities are saying is an "unknown foreign entity."

Reports of the attack were published yesterday, and authorities who investigated the incident believe whoever it was, was looking for foreign policy information and how the candidates my react in future negotiations.

Originally tech's from the Obama camp believed they had a virus and the next day they were informed that the problem was far more serious according to the report.

"You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," an agent told Obama's team."You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system."

Federal agents told Obama's aides that the McCain campaign had suffered a similar attack, which a top McCain official later confirmed.

The Feds assured the Obama team that it had not been hacked by its political opponents. (Obama technical experts later speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese.) A security firm retained by the Obama campaign took steps to secure its computer system and end the intrusion. White House and FBI officials had no comment earlier this week.

More about the specifics of the attack can be found on Xssed.

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