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Two Nuclear Labs Falling for Phishing Tricks
By Robert | January 9, 2008
We are already used with the press making everything bigger than it actually is. For instance, we saw a report by ABC News that stated 2 nuclear labs were hacked. The truth is that there is no real danger but the facts are a lot funnier. It seems that some scientists and workers at these 2 nuclear labs actually fell for the hacker’s oldest trick in the book. We are talking about the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. These two institutions were collecting the names, birth dates and social security numbers of all the scientists that visited the plans. Everything is put in a database.
Starting on the date of October 29, workers of the plants started receiving phishing emails, the classical ones, followed by another classical one with attachments that contained Trojans. After this we found reports that said these emails gained access to both the systems of these companies. This basically translates in the fact that at least one worker in each plant made the mistake of opening an attachment and the fun began. The immediate result was a database that was compromised. Basically, the phiser or phishers got access to all the data of the visitors between 1999 and 2004.
Although media coverings were interesting and we basically thought that everything was a lot more serious, it is not only the fault of the agencies for not looking further. Officials from both test labs gave complex details that were probably aimed towards confusing instead of providing proper information. The truth is that it was the fault of at least two people. To make it even worse, they should have known better than to fall victim to a phishing attack or to click on attachments like that.
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