British spy agency attempts mammoth hack
Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been scanning every public-facing server in 27 countries for several years to find any weak systems in waht some have described as a 'gargantuan scale' hack.
The agency's so-called 'Hacienda' program, revealed by German publication Heise, started in 2009 when GCHQ decided to apply the standard tool of port scanning against entire nations.
Documents published by Heise show GCHQ fully trawls 27 countries – meaning it “randomly scans every IP identified for that country” – and partially scans five other nations. The 32 country names are blanked out in the report. Port scanning has been used by attackers since the early days of TCP, exploiting a flaw in the handshake between TCP clients and servers which means the server leaks information without checking the client's authorisation.
