Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., which hired a former National Security Agency chief to market cybersecurity programs to the government, said some of its own files were exposed after an attack by hackers. The files “pertained to a learning management system for a government agency,” the company said in a statement Tuesday. Booz Allen is conducting a full review of the incident and doesn’t believe the attack affected other data, the statement said without naming the U.S. agency.
Booz Allen Executive Vice President Mike McConnell, a former Navy vice admiral who ran the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1996, has been a leading proponent of bolstering the nation’s defenses against computer attack.
“Admiral McConnell must be very upset about this,” Richard Falkenrath, a principal at the Chertoff Group, a Washington-based security advisory firm, said today in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “He was really one of the early evangelists of cybersecurity. He was the first senior official in the U.S. government to really push this.” Falkenrath is a contributing editor at Bloomberg Television.
Booz Allen declined today to make McConnell available to comment.
An online activist group called Anonymous claimed on July 11 that it stole thousands of military passwords from Booz Allen, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.
McConnell currently oversees Booz Allen’s intelligence business, which last year accounted for $1.2 billion, or 22 percent of the McLean-based company’s $5.6 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that ended in March.
