IMF hacked; High profile cyber attack continues

New York, Jun 12: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become the latest victim of the high profile hacking attempts on major corporations and institutions. IMF officials confirmed the hacking attempt to their network.

Even though the IMF spokesman rejected to comment on the extend of the attack, whether data breach happened to confidential information on the economic health of its 187 member countries or any systems were infiltrated, he said that they are "investigating" it.

"We had an incident," said IMF spokesman David Hawley. "We're investigating it and the fund is completely functional."

The Wall Street Journal reported that IMF staff received a routine notification about the incident by email Wednesday, Jun 8 asking them to contact their tech department if they saw anything suspicious.

The latest hacking attempt on IMF popped up after a day the Citibank faced cyber attack on its online account site and compromised names, account numbers and email addresses of more than 200,000 North Americans Citibank account holders.

Similarly, in recent times the online gaming giant Sony also faced phishing attack on its services like Sony PlayStation Network, Qriocity and SonyPictures. Sony was forced to pull out these services offline and resumed nearly after one month.

Another high profile hacking victim is the Lockheed Martin, the biggest weapon manufacturer in the United States. Hackers infiltrated Lockheed Martin's network, but the company said that there were no data breach. US government offered help to Lockheed to investigate the hacking.

The internet search engine Google also reported hacking attempt on Google mail accounts including senior US government officials, Chinese political activists etc. Google accused Chinese attackers behind the attack, that sparked another fight between Google and the Chinese Communist government.

Chinese government strongly rejected Google's accusation by saying that it was "unacceptable to blame China for all hacking attempts." Later, China's official newspaper People's Daily warned Google becoming a political tool of West and blamed that Google was "deliberately pandering to negative Western perceptions of China, and strongly hinting that the hacking attacks were the work of the Chinese government."

Mean while, hacking attempts came to light in India also. Announcing support to Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev in their fight against corruption, the hacker group Anonymous attacked website of National Informatics Centre (NIC INDIA) and posted their logo along with a message to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Congress General Secretary and the youth Icon, Rahul Gandhi, also faced attack from hackers. Cyber-punks illegally accessed the password and broke into two servers created by Rahul Gandhi for family constituencies in UP. Attackers tweaked the internet address to redirect users to an engineering college website.

The cyber attack on IMF came few a weeks after its former chief arrested for allegedly raping a hotel maid.

OneIndia News