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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- An anti-American group of hackers have broken into at least two of the US Army's critical web servers, according to an exclusive report by InformationWeek.
Despite the advanced security and antivirus software the Defense department's has in place, the hackers were able to breach the servers.
The hackers are based in Turkey, which has seen activity associated with the al-Qaida network. However, it is still unclear if the group is affiliated in any way with the notorious terrorist organization.
The attacks are currently being investigated by the Department of Defense and the US Army's Judge Advocate General's Office and Computer Emergency Response Team.
The group, who call themselves the "m0sted", broke into servers at the Army's McAlester Ammunition Plant in McAlester, Oklahoma on January 26, and previously at the US Army Corps of Engineers' Transatlantic Center in Winchester, Virginia on September 19, 2007.
In the case of the McAlester Ammunitions plant breach, visitors who were trying to access the plant's website found themselves redirected to a page that featured a m0sted-led protest against climate change.
In the Army Corps of Engineers' attack, the hackers sent website vistorsto www.m0sted.net, which at the time contained anti-American and anti-Israeli messages and images.
The site is currently a parked domain page with airline reservation links.
It is still not clear as to whether the hackers managed to steal any sensitive data from the Army's servers.
So far, officials have followed through with records search warrants against Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, as well as other Internet and email service firms in their ongoing efforts to discover the hackers' true identities.
According to officials, the hackers broke into the web servers by using an SQL injection where they successfully exploited a security vulnerability in Microsoft's SQL Server database.
In the past, the hackers performed similar attacks on many other websites, including an attack in July 2008 against a site operated by international computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.
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Comment by Anonymous on Friday, May 29, 2009
al Qaeda does not have any reputed links to Turkey, so stating that Turkey "is known to have ties to the al-Qaida network" is a factual error.
A secular Muslim country and NATO member with 800 soldiers in Afghanistan, Turkey has cracked down hard on al Qaeda-linked groups since November 2003, when 63 people died in four truck bomb attacks in Istanbul that targeted two synagogues, the British consulate and a British bank. Seven men were jailed for life in 2007 for the bombings, including a Syrian national who masterminded the attacks. Police there have accelerated operations since July 2008, when three policemen and three assailants died in a gunbattle outside Istanbul's U.S. consulate. Last December, a Turkish court jailed 22 al Qaeda members believed to have been planning an attack on Western consulates. In January, one suspected militant died and another was injured after undercover police intervened to prevent them from robbing an Istanbul post office.
Turkey has security problems due to its proximity to the Mideast, and its extensive affiliations to West, but to impute that it is terror sponsor is just plain wrong. This is akin to saying that the U.S. and Europe have links to the organization because terrorists operate there.
Comment by Liam Eagle on Friday, May 29, 2009
I'm sure the phrase wasn't intended that way, but I can certainly see your point - that the sentence might be taken to imply that the nation of Turkey had the links, which it doesn't. I edited the phrasing.