231 Online Attacks from US Spooks in 2011

Although the United States has been constantly complaining about how the Chinese carrying out hacking attacks against it, it recently turned out that the country has an aggressive attack plan of its own as well.


It was revealed that American spooks carried out more than 200 offensive online operations in 2011 alone. In other words, you can see how the United States has been running a clandestine war across the Internet. This disclosure was part of a classified data provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The program in question costs the United States $652 million annually and is dubbed GENIE. It requires American computer experts to break into foreign networks and put them under surreptitious control of the United States.

Thus far, the project has placed “covert implants” in computing devices, routers and firewalls on tens of thousands of computers every year. Still, the country wanted to expand those numbers into the millions. According to the secret data provided by Snowden, the American campaign of computer intrusions is much broader and more aggressive than previously believed. Maybe, this is because the government treats all such cyber-operations as clandestine and refuses to acknowledge them.

Almost 3/4 of the American attacks were against top-priority targets. The list of those is reported to include adversaries like Iran, Russia, China and North Korea and activities like nuclear proliferation. According to the report, there’ve been few cases of real sabotage, while major part of attacks have been actual snooping, so the users would only have seen a slight slowing down of their PCs.