2008 cyberattack on United States
Encyclopedia
The 2008 cyberattack on the United States was the "worst breach of U.S. military computers in history". The defense against the attack was named "Operation Buckshot Yankee". It led to the creation of the United States Cyber Command
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infected by a foreign intelligence agency was left in the parking lot of a Department of Defense
facility at a base in the Middle East. It contained malicious code and was put into a USB port from a laptop computer that was attached to United States Central Command
.
The Pentagon spent nearly 14 months cleaning the worm, named agent.btz, from military networks. Agent.btz, a variant of the SillyFDC worm, has the ability "to scan computers for data, open backdoors, and send through those backdoors to a remote command and control server."
United States Cyber Command
United States Cyber Command is an armed forces sub-unified command subordinate to United States Strategic Command. The command is located in Fort Meade, Maryland and led by General Keith B. Alexander. USCYBERCOM centralizes command of cyberspace operations, organizes existing cyber resources and...
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History
It started when a USB flash driveUSB flash drive
A flash drive is a data storage device that consists of flash memory with an integrated Universal Serial Bus interface. flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, and physically much smaller than a floppy disk. Most weigh less than 30 g...
infected by a foreign intelligence agency was left in the parking lot of a Department of Defense
United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...
facility at a base in the Middle East. It contained malicious code and was put into a USB port from a laptop computer that was attached to United States Central Command
United States Central Command
The United States Central Command is a theater-level Unified Combatant Command unit of the U.S. armed forces, established in 1983 under the operational control of the U.S. Secretary of Defense...
.
The Pentagon spent nearly 14 months cleaning the worm, named agent.btz, from military networks. Agent.btz, a variant of the SillyFDC worm, has the ability "to scan computers for data, open backdoors, and send through those backdoors to a remote command and control server."