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Government The Almighty Buck IT Politics

International Monetary Fund Hit By Cyber Attack 208

Posted by timothy from the prithee-cease-with-such-vile-news dept.
DotNM writes "CityNews and other media outlets are reporting that the International Monetary Fund has been hit by a 'cyber attack.' They are withholding most of the details; however, it is known that the World Bank has shut down a 'link' between them and the IMF." Adds reader Hugh Pickens, "A cyber security expert told Reuters the infiltration had been a targeted attack, which installed software designed to give a nation state a 'digital insider presence' at the IMF. 'The code was developed and released for this purpose,' said Tom Kellerman, who has worked for the Fund. Bloomberg quoted an unnamed security expert as saying the hackers were connected to a foreign government — however, such attacks are very difficult to trace."
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International Monetary Fund Hit By Cyber Attack More

International Monetary Fund Hit By Cyber Attack

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  • Social engineering and clickers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jhoegl ( 638955 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @03:00AM (#36416148)
    Not much info is given, but it looks like someone got an email, they clicked it and then got infected.

    So the hack was really just an employee doing something.

  • IOW, the Chinese (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gmhowell ( 26755 ) <gmhowell@gmail.com> on Sunday June 12, 2011 @03:01AM (#36416150) Homepage Journal

    Bloomberg quoted an unnamed security expert as saying the hackers were connected to a foreign government — however, such attacks are very difficult to trace."

    IOW, the Chinese did it, and everyone is too fucking scared to point the finger.

    • Or those pesky Russians, it cant be Americans obviously.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's exactly what the guy responsible for the cyber attacks would say!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Nonsense, if the Chinese did it, that would have been an act of war. Don't you remember that fancy speech? Only choice is to blame Anonymous. The extra excuse for new laws is a bonus of course.

    • Re:IOW, the Chinese (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12, 2011 @03:42AM (#36416274)

      I'm sorry, but after seeing how the IMF and the World Bank basically actively keep the desperate state of Africa up, causing horrible wars and mass-starvation, just for the wealth of the "west",
      I, for one, proudly proclaim, that anyone who tries to kick their asses for that cause, is a hero to me, and anyone who disagrees will be force-moved to Africa, and get a good luck wish from me. (Won't help him one bit though).

      Luckily, I know most people here are pretty educated about such things.

      P.S.: If it was China, which I disagree with, I don't think they did it for that cause though.

    • The purpose is to provide sufficient excuse to continue military spending. You may recall the USA hit it's debt limit and is about to default. This will persuade the dissenting politicians that they should vote for an increase in the limit.

    • Re:IOW, the Chinese (Score:5, Funny)

      by lexsird ( 1208192 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @05:01AM (#36416432)

      Haha, I was wondering what "America has defaulted on its Chinese loans!" means? Does that mean we are going to be evicted? That is what CountryWide Loans did to me and my wife when we defaulted on our mortgage. "Whoopsie, catch you next month?" didn't cut is for us too many times. Doesn't Proverbs or something read "A borrower is slave to the lender?" and "Never a borrower or lender be?" I guess nobody played Monopoly either. Here's one thing about playing Monopoly, what happens when the big kid flips the board over and pounds you with your own Radio Flyer Wagon?

      China: "USA...you land on Park Place, it has hotel, you owe me, I win!
      USA: "grrrr...."
      China: "you empty pockets NOW!"
      USA: "You want wants in my pockets? Ok...here you go. BOOOOOOOOM, it's a thermal nuke from space! I guess you shouldn't try hacking us..lol."
      China: "Jokes on you, we have nanobot and organic weapons we have been seeding you from Wal-Mart! You will all turn to zombies, we will rule the world!"
      Australia: "Eastern Australia is attacking Western Australia...I need card, and I am strat moving all my armies to Siam....What?"
      Britain: "I say old chap, you are playing the wrong game! It's Monopoly, not RISK."
      Alfred E. Newman: What? Me worry?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by alfredo ( 18243 )
        If so, the IMF takes over our economy. Judging from what they have done to countries like Malawi, Niger, and other victims, they will sell our assets off at pennies on the dollar to domestic and foreign corporations, force the end to the social safety net, workers rights, and any charitable work by the government. Famine and other cases of human suffering has no effect on the IMF. Corporate profit is all that matters. We will be owned by the people who forced this crisis. It is called "Disaster Capitalism

        • If so, the IMF takes over our economy. Judging from what they have done to countries like Malawi, Niger, and other victims, they will sell our assets off at pennies on the dollar to domestic and foreign corporations, force the end to the social safety net, workers rights, and any charitable work by the government. Famine and other cases of human suffering has no effect on the IMF. Corporate profit is all that matters.

          We will be owned by the people who forced this crisis. It is called "Disaster Capitalism."

          It's happening in the USA too. At the state and Federal level we're being told that we can no longer afford workers' rights and the social safety net, though somehow we can afford tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.

          Basically, those who already have most of the money are using its power to squeeze more out of those who only have a little.

    • Bloomberg quoted an unnamed security expert as saying the hackers were connected to a foreign government — however, such attacks are very difficult to trace."

      Not as difficult to trace as "unnamed security experts".

      I'm going to get flack from a hopper load of "Certifeyed" "Ethical Hackers" (with links to their business touting security blogs in their homepage link but...

      an "unnamed security expert" is an oxymoron (they tend to be attention whores). Seriously - it's like reading "an unnamed actor today said he/she had been asked to take over Charlie Sheen's job". Bullshit. Even a bullet in the brain wouldn't stop 'em from letting the media know who they were - ev

  • Is this to be interpreted as a declaration of war on the IMF? Because that was long overdue.

  • *Foreign* government??? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    > Bloomberg quoted an unnamed security expert as saying the hackers were connected to a foreign government
    So this "unnamed security expert" sees the IMF as a (world?) government or as part of some (the american?) government.
    Or what does the word "foreign" mean here?

  • foreign (Score:5, Insightful)

    by anonieuweling ( 536832 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @03:54AM (#36416298)
    How can the hackers be foreign if we're the *international* monetary fund?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by azalin ( 67640 )
      Well, maybe in the next "update" the FBI agents will carry calculators instead of walkie-talkies instead of guns. Who knows.
      Good news is ET will have his phone call either way

    • Re:foreign (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @04:15AM (#36416348) Journal

      Many in the world view the IMF as the European arm[1] of the Western Powers. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis the IMF recommended actions (e.g. allow important/strategic local banks to fail or to be bought up by foreign companies) that the US and other western countries would not take in their own crisis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis#IMF_Role [wikipedia.org]

      Those actions arguably weakened the countries more than they would have otherwise. One can compare those countries with Malaysia (which declined the IMF's "help" and "advice"). Some later spun the results as Malaysia not recovering as much but if the country doesn't crash as low naturally it doesn't rise back as much ;).

      [1] With the World Bank being the US arm...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by am 2k ( 217885 )

      How can the hackers be foreign if we're the *international* monetary fund?

      Aliens?

    • Aliens

  • Credit Cards (Score:3)

    by jamesl ( 106902 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @04:57AM (#36416416)

    Maybe the politicians will have to stop using their (our) national "credit cards" for a while. A few decades would be nice.

  • Nevermind (Score:4, Funny)

    by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @05:10AM (#36416446)
    Nevermind, it turns out it was just Goldman Sachs trying to colocate their servers with the IMF computers...

  • Dominique Strauss-Kahn != Cristiano Ronaldo

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIzuY5V_YUI [youtube.com]

    THIS is how to charm hotel maids :)

  • IMF actions have caused deaths (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cato ( 8296 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @06:41AM (#36416620)

    One example is that the IMF stopped Malawi from stockpiling grain, and many people died of starvation as a result:

    "... when in 2001 the IMF found out the Malawian government had built up large stockpiles of grain in case there was a crop failure, they ordered them to sell it off to private companies at once. They told Malawi to get their priorities straight by using the proceeds to pay off a loan from a large bank the IMF had told them to take out in the first place, at a 56 per cent annual rate of interest. The Malawian president protested and said this was dangerous. But he had little choice. The grain was sold. The banks were paid.

    The next year, the crops failed. The Malawian government had almost nothing to hand out. The starving population was reduced to eating the bark off the trees, and any rats they could capture. The BBC described it as Malawiâ(TM)s âoeworst ever famine.â There had been a much worse crop failure in 1991-2, but there was no famine because then the government had grain stocks to distribute. So at least a thousand innocent people starved to death.

    Extracted from http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-its-not-just-dominique-strausskahn-the-imf-itself-should-be-on-trial-2292270.html [independent.co.uk]

    Other examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund#Impact_on_access_to_food [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:IMF actions have caused deaths (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JamesP ( 688957 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @09:26AM (#36417220)

      Incompetent governments blaming it on someone else. Oldest trick in the book.

      And btw, defaulting is not an option. The ONLY reason the US dollar still stands is that the US NEVER defaulted.

      • We've essentially defaulted, just by the equivalent of someone in debt getting more credit cards to "pay" their bills, in a pile of self-referential paper pyramid scams with no basis in real wealth . To speak of "the full faith and credit of the United States" is such a farce, the U.S. is beyond bankrupt with liabilities far exceeding the ever-shrinking assets.

        • We've essentially defaulted

          I know what you're getting at, but the biggest effect of defaulting is losing the faith of those who might give you loans. Saying we've "essentially defaulted" when this is not the case is stretching the word "defaulted" pretty thin. The picture is a little nicer if you consider debt as a fraction of GDP, but it's still not rosy. What do you mean by "ever-shrinking" assets?

          • Our total obligations are many time GDP, despite the usual old saw you are trying to invoke that only considers "national debt". The nations that are coming to power and that will soon surpass the U.S. in every way have already lost faith in the USA and have begun the move away from the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt holding. More and more countries will lose faith in the dollar and move from U.S. securities and use of the dollar. We are losing, via outsourcing and globalization, the ability to generate real

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hitmark ( 640295 )

        Loan 1 000 and the bank owns you. Loan 10 000 000 and you own the bank...

  • I think it was Bin Laden. He realized his body was not going to last much longer, so he had it copied onto those thousands of USB drives and hidden in various files using steganography techniques. Then, when the US forces analysed them, the bits of Bin Laden's consciousness became assembled in the US government's computer networks. From there, it was trivial for Bin Laden's digital ghost to get into the IMF.

    See how simple that was?

    • you forgot about his porn, the hundreds of digitized minxes of arabsexxx.com will reassemble and writhe their way into the nodes of cyberspace, becoming the opiate of the masses

  • Define "foreign"? (Score:3)

    by Shoten ( 260439 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @07:58AM (#36416854)

    This is the IMF. What's a foreign government, in that context...Martians?

  • Why not a company? (Score:3)

    by johanw ( 1001493 ) on Sunday June 12, 2011 @08:36AM (#36417018)
    Why would a large organization always mean a country? Why not a large bank that wants to know in advance how much risk is really involved in lending money to Greece? Goldman-Sachs has been rumbeling in that area more than enough already.
  • The banksters themselves could be the cause and the reason. Only the banksters have reason to lose money that cannot be traced. By blaming some unknown "enemy", these banksters use the classic maneuver of mis-direction. No one would expect a den of thieves, liars and charlatans to steal from themselves and then claim not knowing their system that has been in place for hundreds of years.

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