Nasa hacker exploits known media vulnerabilities
Date: August 03, 2008Source: blogs.guardian.co.uk
The main vulnerability he's exploited is that most journalists are generalists and don't know enough to challenge him on the claims that he has made, whether they are about his exploits or the US justice system. His statements about the case have gone largely unchallenged, no matter how outlandish.
First off, it is oft-repeated that he broke into 'top-secret' systems. No, he broke into unclassified systems, which doesn't mean that they are unimportant to the daily operations of the US military and Nasa, but it's wrong to say that they were top-secret. Classified - 'top-secret' - networks are almost isolated in both virtual and many times physical ways from the public internet. From Darpa, one of the agencies that McKinnon tried to hack, there is a description of the US Department of Defence networks:
The Global DoD Enterprise Network forms the backbone of the DoD Global Information Grid (GIG). It consists of satellite-based networks, an optical core network, optical edge networks, and land-based fixed wireless networks, all with strong connectivity to tactical wireless networks. Incidentally, all this is virtually separate from the public internet, but, today shares some of its resources.
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