On Bush's Watch, U.S. Suffered Its "Electronic Pearl Harbor"
Kroft spoke to Jim Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which advises Obama on issues relating to cyber-security:
“In 2007 we probably had our electronic Pearl Harbor. It was an espionage Pearl Harbor,” Lewis said. “Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don’t know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information.”
How much is a terabyte?
“The Library of Congress, which has millions of volumes, is about 12 terabytes. So, we probably lost the equivalent of a Library of Congress worth of government information in 2007,” Lewis explained.
“All stolen by foreign countries?” Kroft asked.
“Yeah. This was a serious attack. And that’s really what made people wake up and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get a grip on this,’” Lewis said.
So why has the public never learned of this? Because the Bush White House kept the lid on it, naturally:
“You know, I’ve been trying to figure out why that is. And some of it is the previous administration didn’t want to admit that they had been rolled in 2007. There’s a disincentive to tell people, ‘Hey, things are going badly.’ But it doesn’t seem to be sinking in.
And last November, according to Lewis, "someone was able to get past the firewall and encryption devices of one of the most sensitive U.S. military computer systems and stay inside for several days." That system? The CENTCOM network, which you might know as "the people who are fighting all of our wars." The hackers were able to sit inside the network, tracking information and documents "like they were part of military command."
This, Lewis said, is the "most significant" breach of security ever "acknowledged by the Pentagon." Not acknowledging this, however, is the Bush administration, on whose watch all of this happened.
LINK and LInk.