Hackers were unsuccessful in their attack on a US Air Force network last week, despite hammering the network in "one of the most orchestrated" attacks seen by the Air Force in the past six months.

Officials said that over 125,000 unsuccessful attempts were made to access the network at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base on Friday in "a concerted and directed attack".

Lieutenant General Richard Reynolds said: "I don't know whether they wanted to get in and just get information, or whether they wanted to get in and cripple our network."

But given the projects running at the base, the hackers may well have had sinister designs.

The base houses one of the US government's biggest supercomputers, the Major Shared Resource Centre, and plays host to project management for large weapons such as the B-2 Stealth bomber.