Report: Chinese hacked US weather systems

Chinese hackers breached United States federal weather tracking and prediction systems in September, causing officials to cut off access to the data, according to a report.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told the Washington Post that the National Weather Service’s systems were hacked in late September.

{mosads}Apart from the attack itself, NOAA is now under fire for not acknowledging a problem until Oct. 20 and not notifying the proper channels in a timely fashion.

NOAA did not say where the attacks came from, but Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) told the Post that NOAA acknowledged the Chinese source to him.

“NOAA told me it was a hack and it was China,” said, and accused the agency of “deliberately misleading the American public in its replies.”

NOAA refused to tell the Post whether any classified information was compromised, nor why officials did not say there was a problem until the next month. NOAA also did not tell the Commerce Department’s inspector general until this month.

But the agency said its response to the incident began immediately.

The news about NOAA’s hack came two days after the U.S. Postal Service said it was also hacked by the Chinese, an attack that compromised data on hundreds of thousands of employees.

Airlines, shipping, fishing, disaster planning and more essential functions rely on the weather service’s information, which was shut down temporarily to protect against further damage from the attack.

The Post said Delta Airlines was affected by the loss of data, but it had enough internal information to protect its operations.