Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project and made off with several terabytes of code. The Pentagon, and consequently the Wall Street Journal, suspects Chinese involvement.
The Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the F-35 Lightning II Fighter, is the most costly project in Pentagon history, so it’s a little bit problematic that some spies scampered in and nicked an unknown, but undoubtedly large, quantity of data without getting anywhere near caught. The cyber-spies encrypted the data on its way out, so nobody’s really sure where they came from or where the data went, but some IP addresses have been tracked to China, prompting a little bit of back-and-forth between the DoD and the Chinese government.[INDENT][quote]A Pentagon report issued last month said that the Chinese military has made “steady progress” in developing online-warfare techniques. China hopes its computer skills can help it compensate for an underdeveloped military, the report said.
The Chinese Embassy said in a statement that China “opposes and forbids all forms of cyber crimes.” It called the Pentagon’s report “a product of the Cold War mentality” and said the allegations of cyber espionage are “intentionally fabricated to fan up China threat sensations.”
[/INDENT]Though the most valuable information, including data on the F-35’s flight control and sensors, is inaccessible (stored on non-networked computers), nobody’s really sure exactly what happened, and nobody, from the manufacturers to the researchers to the Pentagon’s press team, wants to talk about it. It’s a pretty alarming read, check it out.[/quote]damn. how long would they have had to been connected to the system to yank terabytes of data and encrypt on the fly? is this a matter of chinese hackers being that good, or our dod network security being that bad?
Depends on the bandwidth out of the Pentagon. Any attack would be multi-homed so originating bandwidth would aggregate, but an actual Terabyte = 8 Terabits = 8,000,000,000,000b/86400 sec. in a day = 92,592,592bps or 92Mb/sec if they were connected for a day, not counting TCP overhead. The math gets easier after that, but it’s not unlikely the connection was some sort of 100Mb fiber metro ring, so let’s call it a day.
Actually, this is as planned. Now that the Chinese have the data for another bloated, overrun, and probably less effective than planned program, their military is d0med!~
I had no idea they were calling the Joint Strike Fighter the “Lightning II”. Have we used up all the cool sounding names? It’s not like it has much in common with the P-38.
When you spread programs like these over all 50 states, with hundreds (thousands?) of contractors, it’s easy to see why you would want to share some resources for project summaries, updates and status meetings. The problem with so many contractors is that you only need one weak link and you have a problem. And Advanced Nepotism LLC, owned by Senator X’s daughter, likely has lower security standards than Lockheed Martin.
It’s supposed to be in homage to the P-38. Lockheed has a hard on for the name, though. The company called the F-22 the Lightning II for years, before the Air Force named it the Raptor.
The important stuff isn’t, but unfortunately if they get enough unclassified information and piece it together they might be able to guess at a few things. And there’s plenty of opportunity for low-rent “industrial” espionage here too, even if they can’t shoot our planes out of the sky.
Maybe they didn’t steal anything. Maybe they just encrypted terabytes of randomly generated data to simulate an actual theft. Since it’s encrypted there’s no way of knowing what’s in there, so it could be anything! Panic!
