An anti-American group of hackers have broken into at least two of the US Army's critical web servers, according to an exclusive report by InformationWeek.
Despite the advanced security and antivirus software the Defense department's has in place, the hackers were able to breach the servers.
The hackers are based in Turkey, which has seen activity associated with the al-Qaida network. However, it is still unclear if the group is affiliated in any way with the notorious terrorist organization.
The attacks are currently being investigated by the Department of Defense and the US Army's Judge Advocate General's Office and Computer Emergency Response Team.
The group, who call themselves the "m0sted", broke into servers at the Army's McAlester Ammunition Plant in McAlester, Oklahoma on January 26, and previously at the US Army Corps of Engineers' Transatlantic Center in Winchester, Virginia on September 19, 2007.
In the case of the McAlester Ammunitions plant breach, visitors who were trying to access the plant's website found themselves redirected to a page that featured a m0sted-led protest against climate change.
In the Army Corps of Engineers' attack, the hackers sent website vistorsto
ted west jet airtran.com airtrans.com at m0sted.net, which at the time contained anti-American and anti-Israeli messages and images.
The site is currently a parked domain page with airline reservation links.
It is still not clear as to whether the hackers managed to steal any sensitive data from the Army's servers.
So far, officials have followed through with records search warrants against Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, as well as other Internet and email service firms in their ongoing efforts to discover the hackers' true identities.
According to officials, the hackers broke into the web servers by using an SQL injection where they successfully exploited a security vulnerability in Microsoft's SQL Server database.
In the past, the hackers performed similar attacks on many other websites, including an attack in July 2008 against a site operated by international computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.
