Defense Tech: UK Cyber Attack Reported — This is going to eventually boil down to what country has the best hackers. Hazard a guess?

Other reports suggest that over 24 RAF bases and 75% of Royal Navy ships — including the aircraft carrier Ark Royal — systems were infected/impacted. Unconfirmed reports implied that the stations attacked by the worm were ones that would be used to scramble aircraft for Russian bomber intercept. Sources inside the MoD have stated they are investigating the computer virus/worm. However, they firmly denied any knowledge of any e-mails being sent to a Russian.

This attack came on the heels of a similar attack on the Pentagon in the United States. Could this be the same bug? Cyber security experts say they appear to be similar but are not willing to say they were identical. The computer virus caused the Pentagon to ban the use of USB memory sticks or flash drives.

Although the US Department of Defense has not provided any official comment on the attack on their UK ally, one thing is clear, cyber attacks have accelerated and many believe we are on the verge of an all-out cyber war.

Found by Teagon Murray.




  1. GF says:

    I knew there was a reason Obama said, “…our nation is at war against a far reaching network of violence and hatred…” in his inaugural address. It’s all starting to make sense. 😉

  2. flipouk says:

    I can’t believe these guys are still using Windows…

    When will they learn?

  3. jimbo says:

    #2,

    Search for “MS Windows XP in Control of Royal Navy Nuclear Powered Sub fleet”,

    and read the comments.

    Do you seriously think they use the same windows as you use on your little tiny PC to post uninformed comments on a post you know nothing about?

    We learnt along time ago American.

  4. jimbo says:

    It was the Russians!

  5. ECA says:

    MAYBE, this will force WINDOWS/MS and the rest to start protecting there OS, and do it right.

  6. keaneo says:

    RTFA – nice to see the comments at a Brit site can be as confused and egregious as those at DU.

  7. Jopie says:

    Ofcourse we were just waiting for a post like this when we read this story last year:

    http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2008/12/18/ms-windows-xp-in-control-of-royal-navy-nuclear-powered-sub-fleet/

  8. kraut says:

    The USS Yorktown was in trouble and “dead in the water” in 1998 when a Windows NT system which was essential for ship operation failed. Checkout the story in on Wired from wayback then: http://is.gd/gXIJ

  9. Angel H. Wong says:

    It’s a good thing to know the American kids are never going to do any of these attacks. While the kids from other countries are trying to hack foreign government institutions. The ones from the USA are too busy sending naked pictures of themselves via cell phone.

  10. Milo says:

    These cyber attack stories from the military never amount to anything.

  11. deowll says:

    Why would you want to hack the British?

    They usually just leave priviliged information laying around in a laptop or CD somewhere.

    I don’t know how common this is but considering the number of times such items have been turned in when found by the public they must be pretty common.

  12. sargasso says:

    Krygystan, is apparently totally offline. Some sort of DOS attack from Russia.


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