World Bank Under Cyber Siege in 'Unprecedented Crisis'

It appears a contractor at the World Bank methodically compromised a ton of sensitive information.

Article Summary:

Between 18 and 40 servers at the World Bank Group were secretly compromised during the past year. Among them: 6 SAP servers, a security/password machine, a server that contained "scanned images of staff documents" and one that held contract-procurement data.

Senior IT guy at the bank's headquarters: "They took our existing data stores and organized them in a way that they could be easily accessed at will...They had access to everything...They had the keys to every room at the bank. And we can't say whether they still do or don't..."

The first major breach was on the subsidiary International Finance Corp in 2007. The invader had at least 6 months of total access to the company's data.

A second major breach occurred in April '08 on the World Bank Treasury system.

Then in June they found a sysadmin password on an external box which let them to log into the World Bank's insurance arm. From there they compromised yet another sysadmin account and you get the picture.

Evidently a contractor installed a keystroke logger.