China hacks into U.S. weather satellite network [NOAA]

This happened back in Sept. but due to the NOAA trying to keep it quiet, it's coming out now

Chinese hackers have breached the USA's weather forecasting systems, disrupting emergency and disaster planning in a hack one US congressman described as a cover-up, the Washington Post reports.

The September hack was not discussed internally by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) until 20 October and even then authorities were not informed, sources familiar with the breach alleged.

The NOAA says it wasn't hacked but, in a statement, insisted "unscheduled maintenance" was behind the outage. The agency therefore made no mention of a breach to the Commerce Department until 4 November. That late report was in violation of policy and sparked an investigation.

Linky

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the attack but did not indicate the source of the breach. However, the agency told Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., that China was to blame, Wolf's spokesman, Dan Scandling, said.



"Sources said a unspecified server linking "many" NOAA computers was compromised due to lax security controls.

The attack knocked offline servers previously described by NOAA as critical "environmental intelligence" feeds to Europe and Canada supplying data on hurricanes and air temperature and humidity.

Agencies including the European Center for Medium-range Forecasting in Britain lost operational data sent through NOAA and commercial organisations including Delta Airlines fell back to internal meteorologists."


That's all we need now is them tampering with the weather feeds, blocking out warnings or implementing warnings that are false
Not to mention gather whatever information that may be useful to them

The weather satellite data include forecasts and warnings vital to Americans and the U.S. economy, University of Georgia meteorologist J. Marshall Shepherd said in an e-mail.

"The Chinese hacking of our weather system illustrates that they also understand the value of this data and information," he said. "Every corner of our lives depends on weather information." NOAA said it performed unscheduled maintenance to mitigate the attacks, but all services have since been fully restored.

The agency wouldn't provide details on what was attacked, whether anything was removed, whether malicious software was let loose in the system or how long the maintenance took after the attack.

www.usatoday.com...

Wow.. Good for china.

Of all the things they could've hacked into, they choose our weather.

Anyone tell them that a subscription to The Weather Channel is cheaper than hacking into a sattelite?

Most of the time TWC is wrong plus boring as hell. Maybe this is Chinese punishment for non-productive hackers.

I love how it is always 'Chinese Hackers' with no evidence to back up the claim. With the ability to spoof location data it could be anyone including a 15 year old in Mum's basement having fun.

Blame it on China and get an extra few millions of tax dollars to increase security.

More likely the NSA is behind it just to make themselves seem relevant.

P

a reply to: pheonix358

Exactly what I was thinking. Set the image now in people's heads that China is the big bad enemy so when the war starts it was already expected, same style tactic goes with Russia.

Their not the enemy, but our leaders our true enemy's will make our only friends in the struggle of life enemy's as well.

What bothers me is the fact that these hacks are covered up until the entity hacked is forced to come clean. What is the problem with transparency?

I also wonder what the US is hacking in China?

My question about all of this, is, did they get this idea from the movie battleship? This is how the Japanese captain said that they track US ships in that movie

originally posted by: pheonix358

More likely the NSA is behind it just to make themselves seem relevant.

P

Amen :-)