The Pentagon has been infiltrated by a spearphishing attack that targeted the Joint Chiefs.
CNN is reporting that the unclassified email system used by 4,000 users on the Defense Department network has been down for more than 10 days following a sophisticated cyber attack that used spearphishing to compromise the system. Sources suspect that the attack came from China or Russia and are pointing the finger at Russia because of details of the attack that differ from typical Chinese attacks. Quoting CNN:
All of the required cyber protection and patches were in place, but the attack still was able to find a way into the network that the U.S. government had not seen before, according to the preliminary analysis, the senior Defense official said.