U.S. Naval War College Network and Website Still Down From Hack Over Two Weeks Ago

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Tuesday Silicon Valley reported the U.S. Naval War College's network and website had been down for over two weeks as a result of a hacker. The hacker apparently didn't take the site and network down, but the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command took it offline after detecting the unauthorized access on, or around, November 16.

The site, http://www.nwc.navy.mil, is still down.

"Investigators were trying to determine the extent of the intrusion, Gabos said. They planned to upgrade firewalls and make other unspecified improvements. ``Once that is complete, the network will be restored,'' Gabos said."

Lt. Cmdr. Doug Gabos is the spokesperson for the college.

With such a long time offline, it will be interesting to see if this was the result of a trusted insider, or if there was just a major vulnerability that, until the intrusion occurred had not been known.

This points out the importance of having not only intrusion detection tools, systems and procedures in place, but also the need for regularly performing vulnerability assessments of your network. It also reminds us to always keep the insider threat in mind as controls are established for those authorized with a great amount of systems and network access and capabilities.

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

Comments

This is why spellcheckers are a bad thing. I wonder what a Navel War looks like...

Posted by: J | December 8, 2006 4:12 AM

lol...thanks for pointing that out, J!

No, I don't even have a spell checker to blame...not with this blog creation tool...just lack of my close review and perhaps too much holiday music playing in the background distracting me.

Thanks for the laugh...now I have visions of "navel" wars in my mind...perhaps following the Orange Bowl Parade...

Posted by: Rebecca | December 8, 2006 9:32 AM

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