Copyright 1997 by Newsbytes News Network / Tue, 25 Mar 1997 15:21:41 PST
LONDON, ENGLAND, 1997 MAR 25 (NB) -- By Steve Gold. A BBC TV program last night claimed that hundreds of military secrets, including troop movements and missile capabilities, were stolen from US defense computers and offered for sale by Dutch hackers to Saddam Hussein, the infamous leader of the Iraqis, during the Gulf War.
The BBC wheeled out Dr Eugene Schultz, the former head of computer security at the US Department of Energy, to back up its claim on the Sci Files TV program yesterday evening. Schultz admitted on screen that US government officials watched helplessly during the Gulf War as their files on troop movements et al, were accessed repeatedly by hackers originating from the Netherlands.
According to the BBC, enough information was downloaded by the hackers to have changed the Gulf War's outcome, had the information been passed along to the Iraqis. Fortunately for the West, the program quoted intelligence experts as saying that the Iraqis ignored the stolen information for fear of its being a hoax.
On screen, Schultz said that he and his colleagues discovered that files across 34 sites in the US were accessed and downloaded in the runup to the 1991 Gulf War.
"We realized that these files should not have been stored on Internet capable machines. They related to our military systems, they related to Operation Desert Shield at the time, and later Operation Desert Storm," he said, adding that this was a huge mistake.
Once the Dutch hackers arrived at the correct systems, the TV program said, they fired off salvos of IDs and passwords at the computers until the systems let them in. Once inside, they could pick and choose those files they wanted to download.
"We couldn't do anything about it," Schultz said, adding that, if the computers had been shut down, "they would have found others to launch the attacks from."
According to the BBC, the US government still regards the hacking saga as top secret and classified. The program makers quoted the CIA as neither confirming or denying that the hackers tried to sell military secrets to the Iraqis.
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