Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) hacked
On Wednesday, 48 hours after releasing a policy paper on cybersecurity, the top trade association for intelligence contractors got a first-hand lesson on the subject: they discovered that their website was hacked.
Cryptome, a site affiliated with the hacker collective Anonymous, published the membership emails and phone numbers and in some cases home addresses for the members of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA). By clicking on a link titled, "INSA Nest of Official and Corporate Spies," anyone can find contact information for senior officials at the NSA, FBI, and CIA, as well as top national security contracting firms like Booz Allen Hamilton.
The apparent cyberattack on the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, or INSA, is the latest example of the ability of hackers to penetrate the computer systems of government agencies and private companies — including those that pride themselves on their savvy and expertise in cybersecurity.
INSA is only the latest example of how the intelligence community and its affiliated contractors have been hacked by increasingly brazen hackers. On July 11, Anonymous published some 90,000 emails and login credentials for U.S. military officers after breaking into the servers of Booz Allen Hamilton. The group published the data on a website called Pirate Bay and announced on Twitter that July 11 was "Military Meltdown Monday." The month before, another group of hackers called "LulzSec" (who claim to have since disbanded) published internal files from the FBI and claimed to briefly disable the CIA's public website.
"Due to the nature of our business, INSA takes security very seriously," McCarthy said in a statement. "We are outraged that someone finds it sporting to make private organizational data public, but we are not naïve. It is not a coincidence that this incident happened just two days after INSA's Cybersecurity Council released a report documenting the need for government and the private sector to begin to work together to solve our nations cyber security vulnerabilities."
