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U.S. IT Infrastructure Highly Vulnerable
An anonymous reader writes "The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee in their February 2005 report to GW writes "...infrastructure of the United States, which is now vital for communication, commerce, and control of our physical infrastructure, is highly vulnerable to terrorist and criminal attacks." It goes on to say that "fundamentally new approaches are
needed to address the more serious structural weaknesses of the IT infrastructure" and finally offers "four key findings and recommendations
on how the Federal government can foster new architectures and technologies to secure the
Nation's IT infrastructure." Here is yet another, not surprising, bleak outlook for cyber security in the United States. The full 72-page report can be found here."
Bush has a website on Geocities and it was hacked so they're desperately looking for a more secure host!
From the "slap-the-threat-of-terrorism-everywhere" department:
The following pillars of Western Democracah are hereby also identified as being hideously vulnerable and must be RADICALLY PROTECTED BY NEW LAWS:
- Roads (public)
- Motor vehicles
- Food
- Buildings
- Water
- Air
- Books
- Magazines
- Furniture
- Electricity
- Gas (liquid)
- Gas (er, gassy)
- Speech
- Thought
- The moon
- Everything else that we might think could be fucked up by somebody who has a grudge against anything.
Please bend over and kiss all you freedom goodbye. You owe it to your children's future.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Or crack down on operating systems that have services exposed to the Internet when they don't need to be.
I have two machines on the 'net without firewalls. One running Debian and one running OSX. Neither of these systems has stuff like an RPC daemon listenin on the public network interface. That would just be dumb.
Why haven't MS figured out they can put stuff like that on the loopback interface?
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