Hackers may have had head start in Ottawa cyberattack: documents

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1059412--hackers-may-have-had-head-start-in-ottawa-cyberattack-documents

By Stephanie Levitz and Jim Bronskill
The Canadian Press
Sept. 25, 2011

OTTAWA -- Hackers may have had a four-day head start when they broke 
into government systems in January in an attack that continues to leave 
many employees without full Internet access and revealed flaws in the 
security of federal computers.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press say the Treasury Board and 
Finance departments were notified of "harmful activity" on Jan. 24 by 
the agency that oversees communications security in Canada.

The departments, whose networks are linked, began to remove infected 
computers and institute a series of rolling Internet outages to get to 
the root of the attack.

"I received the report, nothing major," Luc Parson, chief of information 
technology security for the Treasury Board, wrote in a Jan. 25 email. 
"We were already doing all the recommendations except for like 1."

[...]


_____________________________________________________________
Register now for the #HITB2011KUL - Asia's premier
deep-knowledge network security event now in it's 9th year!
http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2011kul/