The Army's computers may have been hacked — by a group of Turkish peaceniks.
Information Week reports that two servers, one at McAlester Ammunition Plant in McAlester, Okla., the other in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Transatlantic Center in Winchester, Va., were broken into on Jan. 26.
Visitors to the McAlester plant's Web site were redirected to another site protesting climate change. Pentagon lawyers have subpoenaed records from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to track down the hackers, according to the magazine.
But they may not have to look too far. The group, which calls itself "m0sted," seems to be very public about its exploits.
It even has a YouTube channel, as well as a video on the competing video-clip site MetaCafe, detailing how in August 2007 it hacked a United Nations Web site to put up messages decrying war, the U.S. and Israel:
"Hacked By Kerem125 m0sted and Gsy," the message posted on the U.N. site read. "That is CyberProtest Hey Ysrail and Usa dont kill children and other people Peace for ever No war."
Both the U.N. hack and the recent one against the Army were achieved by SQL injection, an easy way to crack into lightly defended servers.
The Pentagon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past two years to beef up military cybersecurity.
Information Week noted that Turkey has groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda, but the m0sted material posted online seemed to have no religious elements.
The same group has also carried out attacks against Kapersky Labs, a leading Web security company, and another Army Corps of Engineers site.
The latter redirected users to www.m0sted.net, which at the time contained what Information Week called "anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric and images."
The group's lease on that domain name appears to have expired, and the page now contains links to airline reservation sites.
• Click here to read more at Information Week.
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