:: Deepquest ::

NSA Red Team is like the special forces units of the security industry—highly skilled teams that clients pay to break into the clients’ own networks. These guys find the security flaws so they can be patched before someone with more nefarious plans sneaks in. The NSA has made plenty of news in the past few years for warrantless wiretapping and massive data-mining enterprises of questionable legality, but one of the agency’s primary functions is the protection of the military’s secure computer networks, and that’s where the red team comes in.

So why NSA Red Team Secret Ops is gay?

Well it appears, according to the site defacement archive hosted at Zone-H, that on or around October 5th an NSA web site application was the victim of an SQL injection exploit resulting in a web site defacement. A web application loading a list of recruitment events at colleges was compromised on the careers section of nsa.gov.

10/05/2009 Appearance:

correct appearance:

The attacker, using the handle SQL_Master, is attributed on Zone-H to site defacements of Google Tokelau (a territory in New Zealand) and a Microsoft property in Korea. He has been associated with the Jurm team, a Moroccan hacker group known primarily for web site defacements of the Isreali version web sites of major companies, for example Kia, Sprite, and Fanta.

A Microsoft defacement attributed to SQL_Master from July of this year references “Agd_Scrop, free him”. Agd_Scorp was part of a Turkish hacker group called Peace Crew that defaced NATO and U.S. military web sites as a political reaction to Operation Cast Lead or more commonly the Gaza War where Israel and Hamas forces clashed in December 2008. The two groups are known to have partnered in defacements at the beginning of this year during the conflict in what was termed a virtual war where a few thousand Israeli web sites were defaced. Agd_Scrop appears to have been arrested by Kayseri (central Turkey) police over the summer, and faces up to 20 years in prison on various cybercrime related charges.

Red Team can’t protect their own assets? Seems like.