Hackers Breach the Joint Strike Fighter Program

Cyberwarfare ratchets up as intruders siphon information from the Pentagon's most sensitive and expensive weapons program. Are Chinese hackers responsible?

By Jacob Ward Posted 04.23.2009 at 10:41 am 8 Comments

F-35 Lightning II Senior Airman Julius Delos Reyes/USAF

After frightening revelations that hackers have already managed to break into the computer systems that control huge swaths of the United States' power grid and other pieces of national infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reports that cyber-spies have broken into the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter program -- its costliest initiative -- and made off with several terabytes of sensitive data. Hackers have also managed to get into the Air Force's air-traffic-control system, the Journal reports.

The identity and national origin of the hackers can't be reliably determined, but the Journal cites former U.S. officials as saying that the attacks seem to have come from computers in China. Because it's such an easy matter to mask one's IP address online, however, the source of the attacks is nearly impossible to determine definitively.

China's state-run Global Times newspaper responded that Chinese citizens couldn't have been responsible, because "from a technical point of view, on the global scale hackers in the U.S., Russia, and Israel are at a higher level than those in China." But our recent reporting on the culture of hacking in China suggests that the Global Times's low opinion of its country's hackers isn't justified -- or at least it won't be for long. A Pentagon report released when our article was published last month says that China has made "steady progress" in refining new cyberwarfare strategies and techniques. And as our writer Mara Hvistendahl discovered in China, there's an ever-more-vague distinction between the civilian and military roles of hackers there. Nationalistic young people, responding to a surge of popular esteem for hackers, compete among each other for bragging rights. The Chinese military, meanwhile, sponsors hacker competitions and hand-picks particularly skilled operatives for vaguely defined state-sponsored contracts. Nationalistic civilian hackers, it seems, are just as dangerous to the United States as a centralized military "hacker command".

And as Hvistendahl's article points out, the threat from hackers -- Chinese hackers in particular -- has been thoroughly overlooked. The United States has no centralized force for defending against such attacks (although the Obama administration is rumored to be planning a military command for cybersecurity). And in the meantime, offices across the U.S. are under siege. The Associated Press quotes New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly as saying that the New York Police Department is attacked at least 70,000 times each day, although no attack has yet been successful. As the Wall Street Journal so frighteningly puts it: "Attacks like these -- or U.S. awareness of them -- appear to have escalated in the past six months, said one former official briefed on the matter."

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8 Comments

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jonathan.1296

04/24/09 at 2:24 pm

if i would like to download some terabytes of data from some super secure computer in a super secure network fast enough to be unnoticed, i would need a huge broadband to download those files... maybe by blocking the acces to the most visited sites in my network, like youtube...

sounds a little strange that "several terabytes" were stolen, how can't you know that "several terabytes" are transferring, where is your security... ???

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inderhcp

04/27/09 at 9:11 am

Yeah, Jonathan, that sounds fishy to me too. You would think in one of the most secure, if not THE most secure place in America, that they would have some type of protection from hackers? What about China saying "Oh, it can't be us because there are other countries better at hacking than we are." Please tell me how they would go about monitoring a billion people and saying how good their hackers are or not. It's the friggen Chinese. It's not like they have a very innocent record of jackin' other countries' crap. The whole thing sounds idiotic, just like I do. Lol

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DarkFx

from Winnipeg, Manitoba

05/04/09 at 12:11 pm

You ever torrent anything? You notice your download can reach insane potential when you have many sources? You have Peers that share portions of a file with you. It is download acceleration.
This was done by a Mass of people, probably an Online C.O.R.E. League which each person has multiple servers networking to an unidentifiable source because it would simply not "compute" to the incoming connections, but can force them to comply with a responding destination.
Each Person downloads partitions of an entire web server, exceeding the bandwidth and making it impossible to essentially "turn-off" The Data feed because Its Stored Online.
So when an assault of ping requests comes through multiple ports, the data being transmitted creates commands to the host, and sends the requested data back out. FCC Rules 15. Overwhelming.

I can torrent a 100MB file and approx 2.5MBpsecond.
1000mb= Gigabyte 1000 Gigs= 1 Terabyte

1000+ people downloading in a network, to download portions of Data at 2.5 Gigs a Second is Insane. A Terabyte could be downloaded in a Few Hours. Even if they have 52k modems its still crazy powerful.

The Only Real Protection is Your Own Unique Engineering Language.

www.darkfx.cjb.net

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Blandman

08/19/09 at 5:53 pm

That's. Actually a little scary.

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jethandavis

09/23/09 at 9:41 am

The strange thing is, why would they steal JSF information from us, when other countries have the infromation as well, and are not as secure as us, such as Canada and Denmark?

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robotman2009

09/30/09 at 8:34 pm

Yeah this article is bogus...I had a friend who worked on JSF here in Fort Worth...He was a high up engineer in the project...he said that none of the computers holding that stuff are physically attached to the Internet.

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coolnezz

10/06/09 at 11:39 am

right. systems with very sensitive information, like our national security depends on it, should not even be connected to the internet. that would be the ultimate protection against online hackers/crackers.

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Soofi

10/18/09 at 4:20 pm

They should order computer from some well known online stores

www.OrderComputer.com