Earlier this week, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) will conduct a two-day investigation into the causes of IT failures among operational and civilian personnel.
The system problems began on Monday morning and affected all services of MoDNet’s internal operating systems, including email, internal communications and cloud document servers.
The investigation into the “network disruption” was completed Wednesday afternoon, and the Defense Department found no evidence of a cyberattack by a hostile state such as Russia.
The problems are believed to have affected all 187,000 active-duty military personnel and 60,000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense.
An officer at a British military base said he was “unable to use our email, communicate between forces or access important documents”, adding that it was “impacting the work of the British Armed Forces”.
“We’re talking about sensitive information and communications, and we don’t know if it’s just an internal matter or if outside groups are reading it.”
Whatever the reason, the source said it shows “how vulnerable our IT systems are.”
This was reported by another source in the Ministry of Defense. I that “the system stopped working for several days” and that there have been several similar problems with the MoD’s information systems since the illegal invasion of Ukraine last February.
A £900 million modernization of the MoD’s information systems has been plagued by problems since it launched in 2015.
In 2017, the Defense Department suspended military equipment modernization after a series of failures that it blamed on the supplier, a consortium of private companies led by US technology group DXC.
In response to these problems, the Ministry of Defense launched the £400 million MoDNET Evolve program to replace the existing contract.
Government IT systems have long been the target of state-backed hacking groups.
If I In August, it was revealed that Russian and Chinese hackers had gained access to the State Department’s internal systems through a major security flaw that had been kept secret from the public for two years.
While the government said the hack did not give the hackers access to classified information, insiders said government-linked actors may have had access to correspondence from ambassadors or diplomats stationed abroad that was not marked as classified.
In July, the Defense Department also had to open an investigation after officials mistakenly sent emails containing classified information to close ally Russia rather than the United States due to a typo.
Emails intended for the US Department of Defense were sent to Mali because the email address accidentally did not have an “i” in it. This meant they switched to the West African country’s .ml domain rather than the US military’s .mil domain.
There was another security alert in September when thousands of Defense Department documents were stolen by Russian-linked hackers in a ransomware attack. The documents were uploaded to the dark web after the LockBit ransomware group hacked fence manufacturer Zaun.
Earlier this week, Russian hackers also claimed responsibility for a cyber attack that left the royal family’s official website unavailable for about two hours on Sunday.
Source: I News
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