Category Archives: weapons system

Japan investigates Mitsubishi Electric breach amid national security concerns

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Japan is investigating a possible breach of sensitive defense contracting data following a cyberattack last year on electronics giant Mitsubishi Electric, officials said Wednesday. Data likely stolen in the hack, which Mitsubishi disclosed earlier this year, included specifications of hypersonic missile prototypes that Japan is developing, according to a report in Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper. The Ministry of Defense had sent the specifications to multiple companies, including Mitsubishi, interested in bidding on the missile contract, the report said. Japanese officials have said the high-velocity missile could be used to protect islands in the East China Sea that are the subject of an ongoing territorial dispute between Japan and China. At a press conference Wednesday, government spokesperson Yoshihide Suga confirmed that Japan’s Ministry of Defense was examining the incident’s impact on national security, but declined to give further details. Mitsubishi said in a statement that it reported the breach to the […]

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‘Kicking out the adversary’ is part of new Cybersecurity Directorate’s mission, NSA says

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The National Security Agency’s new Cybersecurity Directorate, charged with helping protect the defense industrial base and sensitive government computers by providing insights on foreign hackers, is now at initial operating capability, senior NSA officials informed reporters at a rare briefing Thursday at Fort Meade. Just this week the fledgling directorate took one of its first public actions, issuing an unclassified alert about nation-state hacking groups actively exploiting vulnerabilities on virtual private networks. Beyond the usual job of such alerts — identifying the bugs and recommending mitigations — the directorate made a point to provide ways for organizations to check whether they have been victimized, something the directorate intends to continue in unclassified ways moving forward. “We need to be sure that people who own networks that are vital to the national security systems and defense systems of this nation can figure out if adversaries have gained access into their networks,” NSA spokesperson Natalie Pittore said. “It’s about […]

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GAO report shows how easy it is to hack DOD weapons systems

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In cybersecurity probes of Department of Defense weapons systems in recent years, penetration testers were able to wrest control of systems with relative ease and generally operate undetected, according to a Government Accountability Office report. “We found that from 2012 to 2017, DOD testers routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in nearly all weapon systems that were under development,” the report states. In one test, a two-person team gained initial access to a system in an hour, then gained full control of the system in a day, the watchdog said. In another, the pen-testers seized control of the operators’ terminals, could see what the operators saw on their screens, and “could manipulate the system,” GAO found. Many of the testers said they could change or delete data. In one case they downloaded 100 gigabytes of it. The scathing report chalks up the insecurities in the Pentagon’s weapon systems to defense officials’ “nascent […]

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Lack of cooperation between contractors creates lasting vulnerabilities for DoD, official says

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Competition among U.S. weapons makers keeps them from collaborating on cybersecurity problems, and it’s causing new and lasting vulnerabilities for the military, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday. Col. Tim Brooks, the mission assurance division chief in the Department of Army Management Office, said a lack of dialogue between contractors is causing headaches as the military looks to harden its systems. Broadly speaking, most weapons systems often overlay multiple different hardware and software products that are not all made by the same company. “With our weapons assessment program, there’s been a lot of time spent trying to break down organizational boundaries and to think about systems of systems,” Brooks said at the Security Through Innovation Summit presented by McAfee and produced by CyberScoop and FedScoop. “That’s compounded by the fact that all these systems of systems are produced by subprime contractors and everyones got non-disclosure agreements and no one wants to disclose their […]

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