Cyber attack on the official US Army website

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Malcolm Frost, the United States Army  spokesman, admitted that a few days ago the official website of the Army was hacked. A group of hackers calling itself the “Syrian Electronic Army”, supported by the Syrian Government, claimed responsibility in a post on its Twitter account. In messages planted on the site the hackers called on the United States: “Stop training terrorists!” and “Your government is corrupt, don’t listen to it!” Immediately after the site was hacked it was taken offline from the Internet and Frost reported that it was done to refute any fears of leakage of classified military data.

It appears that this is the first time that an official site directly managed by the United States Army has been hacked. In January the YouTube and Twitter accounts of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) were hacked in a cyber attack carried out by a group of hackers calling itself the “Cyber Caliphate”. In that incident, the hackers published on the hacked accounts links that they claimed led to documents containing classified information, the source of which was the Army’s computer network. In response, the American Joint Chiefs published a statement that this was simply cybervandalism and nothing more, since the classified network was not breached.

However the incident is apparently the first precedent of its type in which a site belonging to, and managed directly by official Army elements was hacked, but was not the first time that hackers succeeded in breaching the American Administration’s defense mechanisms. A week ago the White House Spokesman announced that in last December the Government database was hacked and that the hackers succeeded in gaining access to a great deal of financial data concerning about 4 million federal employees, both in the past and in the present.

President Obama, who is currently in Germany participating in the G7 summit, stated in his speech that he has urged Congress to pass more laws considering cyber security, which had been formulated by the White House. He added that the hackers included non-government organizations but were not limited to them, and he stated that the attacks attributed to government elements were undertaken to gain access to sensitive intelligence data or from a desire to bring down entire systems as part of their foreign policy.