Well, this is encouraging as all hell, isn't it?

This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that at least four of its websites have been compromised by what NOAA spokesperson Scott Smullen calls "an internet-sourced attack." The breaches occurred in September, but NOAA didn't publicly announce them until late Tuesday. In fact, initially the organization claimed that the network outages were part of routine maintenance, and at least one governmental official is questioning why the breach wasn't immediately reported to the Department of Homeland Security, as any federal organization is required to do in such an instance.

Smullen won't say why the agency hid the breach, nor will he comment on how the attack occurred and what information was compromised. Industry insiders speculate that some of the information probably related to weather satellites ground networks. They say the NWS warning service could have been affected as well.