During the on-going G7 meeting in Germany, US president Barrack Obama called for new cyber-security laws to deal with the growing threats in information technology security. Hours later, a group of Syrian hackers forced the United States Army to take down its website after a cyber attack.
The hacker group called Syrian Electronic Army took to Twitter to boast of the attack. The US army website www.army.mil, posted their own messages such as “Stop training the terrorists!” and “Your government is corrupt don’t listen to it!”. The US Army confirmed the attack but clarified that no sensitive data about the army or its soldiers was compromised. Attempts to open the army.mil website resulted in a message of “This webpage is not available.” The site has since been restored.
The United States is a major target for hacking including an incident last year, where Russian hackers were able to penetrate the White House Computer System were able to read President Barack Obama’s unclassified emails. The discovery of the hacking in October 2014, led to a partial shutdown of the White House email system. Last week, the US said Chinese hackers attacked the US government computers and compromised records of more than four million employees, claims the Chinese government has denied and called the allegations “not responsible, and counterproductive”. Five months ago, a hacker group called “Cyber Caliphate” hijacked the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), posting links to documents they claimed to be confidential files pilfered from US military computers.
