Russians hacked Pentagon unclassified e-mail

Russian hackers apparently carried out a cyberattack against the unclassified e-mail system of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in late July, according to news report Aug 6 citing unnamed officials. No classified information was taken or revealed during the "sophisticated cyber intrusion," which affected about 4,000 military and civilian personnel. Although there was no immediate direct link to the Russian government, apparently it was "clearly the work of a state actor." The attack came around July 25 and forced the Pentagon to take the e-mail system offline. The system was expected to be back up Aug 6.

The so-called spear-phishing attack "exposed a new and different vulnerability" not seen before, apparently. Spear-phishing attacks trick people into opening infected e-mails that steal their network credentials and spread through a network. The hackers used what NBC described as an "automated system that rapidly gathered massive amounts of data and within a minute distributed all the information to thousands of accounts on the Internet." Encrypted social media accounts were used to coordinate the attack. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in April that Russian hackers had briefly broken into the Pentagon's unclassified networks. Hackers believed to have Moscow backing penetrated the State Department and White House networks late in 2014. President Brack Obama’s personal schedule was among the sensitive data that was compromised. US officials also suspect Russians hacked State Department computer systems in October 2014.