Exec Share Lessons Learned From Recent Cyberattack

CIO of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory speaks openly about a a pair of summer attacks

When Pacific Northwest National Laboratory detected a cyber attack--actually two of them--against its tech infrastructure in July, the lab acted quickly to root out the exploits and secure its network. PNNL then did something few other cyber attack victims have been willing to do. It decided to talk openly about what happened.
The labs CIO, Jerry Johnson, last week provided a detailed accounting of the cyber attacks. Speaking at the IW500 Conference in Dana Point, Calif., Johnson described how intruders took advantage of a vulnerability in one of the labs public-facing web servers to plant a drive-by exploit on the PCs of site visitors, lab employees among them. For weeks, the hackers then surreptitiously scouted PNNLs network from the compromised workstations.
Simultaneously, a spear-phishing attack hit one of the labs major business partners, with which it shared network resources. This second group of hackers was able to obtain a privileged account and compromise a root domain controller that was shared by the lab and its partner. When the intruders tried to recreate and elevate account privileges, this action triggered an alarm, alerting the labs cybersecurity team.
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Exec Share Lessons Learned From Recent Cyberattack