17 Year Old Hacks Into Pentagon, Learns Location Of U.S. Warheads. Kid: "It Was Child's Play."

Standard Foreign News Desk ^

[lawdog]

Yeah, they need more money etc. so they can "protect us". God help us !

[BearCub]

should be considered a foreign spy and executed

Why? He used his web browser to ask for the information & our military handed it to him. I can't see from the article that he did anything wrong at all.

[nina0113]

Are there people in the U.S. government who might bring a laptop home, say, and connect it to a LAN at their house?

Several years ago, I was working for a defense contractor, & an utter NITWIT used his manager's laptop to do classified work on, in the office, because his PC was being replaced. He wasn't supposed to be doing classified work on his own either, but he was too lazy to walk down the hall to the secure computer room which had NO external connections. When the security officer found out about it,

• the manager's computer was reformatted, no data removed first, immediately (and was she p!ssed)
• the culprit spent a very bad afternoon with security (he was eventually fired, but it took a few more months)

Most people (not the nitwit) know better than to carry classified work home.

[sigSEGV]

Take a look at dshield.org

[stylin_geek]

I know it would not be hard to set up some kind of data polling of all computers in a sensitive area to track whether or not some knucklehead is doing something he (or she) shouldn't. By the way, I am very very tired of people claiming how wonderful Unix is. I have supported both, and Unix servers have their own set of problems, just like Windows. And, easily, 90% of the time when either a Windows or Unix machine goes down, it is because the end user did something stupid.

[Donna Lee Nardo]

Are there any in NY or FL?

[bok]

What else did he learn is the question. Maybe i was being harsh with saying execution, but i don't take this sort of thing as a kid playing around with a highly sensitive computer system. There isn't any secret locations of warheads for strategic purposes?

[BearCub]

What else did he learn is the question. Maybe i was being harsh with saying execution, but i don't take this sort of thing as a kid playing around with a highly sensitive computer system. There isn't any secret locations of warheads for strategic purposes?

I don't know - I'm sure some are secret. But the point is that the kid was in another country, on what is now a publics data network (the internet) and was 'messing around'. The internet has morphed into such a giant network that it's early (military) roots hardly exist anymore. The military should build it's own private network and get classified stuff off the 'net.

[agitator]

I find this difficult to believe.

[dwbh1342]

The TV satellite pix were NOT HACKED. They were being broadcast on a commercial satellite "in the clear" (unscrambled) because they contained no intelligence value.

Got a source for this info?

[Poohbah]

Nope.