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.
Tags: awareness and training, hacker, Information Security, insider threat, intrusion detection, IT compliance, policies and procedures, privacy, vulnerability assessment