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.