Hackers might know too much about U.S. response to bioterror

Say there’s a bioterrorism attack. The government’s been tasked with laying out an action plan in the event that a volatile superbug gets blasted into the general public. But the details about how the U.S. monitors those threats have been vulnerable to hackers for more than a decade, according to a new report from the Los Angeles Times. Homeland Security officials don’t know whether hackers ever had access to the data, which was housed on a dot-org website run by a private contractor. 

The locations of devices like BioWatch air samplers, which are placed in subway stations and other public places all over the country to detect pathogens like anthrax or its ilk, were vulnerable for years. And internal Homeland Security emails, obtained by The Times, show a “bitter clash within the department” over whether keeping the sensitive bioterror response information on the site would be a threat to national security. 

This all came to light after a former Biowatch security manager filed a whistleblower complaint.