Earlier this week, it emerged that Russian hackers have successfully managed to infiltrate the computer systems at the White House.

Given the highly sensitive nature of information held within any government’s systems, we have to assume that the breach is significant. Although full details of the breach have not yet been made public (and maybe never will) some news sources indicate that President Obama’s schedule was among the information accessed.

It’s hard to see America taking this intrusion lightly, given the history between the countries and I expect to see them double down on security in the coming weeks.

Some are asking questions of the US government’s security policies and rightly so. Although protecting such a vast network of computer systems is a very complex operation. I was not surprised to learn that the attackers gained access to the system via a form of “spear phishing” attack targeting the end user.

Governments, just like any organization, are only as secure as their weakest link. Sadly, when it comes to security the weakest link is always a human. We as people are susceptible to social engineering and as such can unknowingly undermine even the most sophisticated of security technologies.
All hackers need to know is who to target and how – and then they can start to build out a profile of their victim and work out how to target them. It can take a long time but it’s often worth the wait, especially in an attack like this.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming months.