[ISN] FBI Director: Hackers have corrupted valuable data

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9166378/FBI_Director_Hackers_have_corrupted_valuable_data?taxonomyId=17

By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service
March 4, 2010 

Hackers breaking into businesses and government agencies with targeted 
attacks have not only stolen intellectual property, in some cases they 
have corrupted data too, the head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of 
Investigation said Thursday.

The United States has been under assault from these targeted 
spear-phishing attacks for years, but they received mainstream attention 
in January, when Google admitted that it had been hit and threatened to 
pull its business out of China -- the presumed source of the attack -- 
as a result.

FBI Director Robert Mueller called these attacks a threat to the 
nation's security on Thursday, speaking at the RSA Conference in San 
Francisco. "Just one breach is all they need in order to open the 
floodgates," he said, speaking about the hackers behind these 
intrusions. "We have seen not only a loss of data, but also a corruption 
of that data."

Mueller did not say exactly what he meant by corruption of data, but 
security experts worry that if attackers are able to alter source code, 
they might put back-doors or logic bombs in the software they gain 
access to.

[...]


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