DoD: ‘Terabytes’ of data lost to cyber snooping

Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Lynn is keeping up his grim drumbeat about the dangers of cyber-warfare and cyber-espionage; he told an audience at the Defense Information Systems Agency on Tuesday that cyber-snooping has cost the U.S. ‘terabytes’ of information over the past few years, and gave a few new details about the nature of what has been lost:

“It is a significant concern that over the past decade, terabytes of data have been extracted by foreign intruders from corporate networks of defense companies. In a single intrusion this March, 24,000 files were taken,” Lynn said. “When looking across the intrusions of the last few years, some of the stolen data is mundane, like the specifications for small parts of tanks, airplanes, and submarines. But a great deal of it concerns our most sensitive systems, including aircraft avionics, surveillance technologies, satellite communications systems, and network security protocols.”

So this means the integrity of networks themselves — what they contain, their basic functions, and users’ ability to trust their security — must be another key area of focus for the defense and intelligence worlds, Lynn said. It’s worth taking an extended look at what he said:

Read more