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How The NSA Secures Computers
An Anonymous Reader wrote to mention an NSA site covering secure configuration guidelines for a number of operating systems. From the site: "NSA initiatives in enhancing software security cover both proprietary and open source software, and we have successfully used both proprietary and open source models in our research activities. NSA's work to enhance the security of software is motivated by one simple consideration: use our resources as efficiently as possible to give NSA's customers the best possible security options in the most widely employed products."
The NSA has customers? How long do you think it'll be before Microsoft tries to 'aquire' them as the latest 'innovation' in computer security? :D
... but there are also a few guides to the applications security available: http://www.nsa.gov/snac/downloads_all.cfm
my favorite are Cisco IOS and Microsoft CA guides
As an employee of IBM (I work on enterprise storage products) I have this anecdotal story to relate:
The NSA buys lots of our gear, the large multi-terabyte enterprise-class disk storage arrays. In the case I heard about, there were a small handful of boxes. We keep track of the code loaded on each of them for support reasons, so we have a good sense of where each box is and what it's doing.
Our warranty on those arrays is 3 years.
At the end of the warranty period, it is the policy of the NSA to replace the gear outright and start fresh. What we learned was, these boxes had never been put into operation and sat on their shop floor as "excess capacity" (happens in the larger shops, it's a good idea). They had never been attached as storage to their mainframes.
The NSA crushed them. Brand new, unused and perfectly functional with ZERO data on them. Crushed to scrap.
That hurts, guys. It really does. My tax dollars paid for them, my sweat and tears makes them run, and the gov't just hauls them outside and crushes them when they can't get support via the original warranty terms. They will never let a shred of data leave their shop for fear of losing control of classified info, but damn, these never had any!
Why do they treat our tax money so callously?
the guide to securing Windows XP is actually a link to http://distrowatch.com/ so you can choose one of the many different options they have laid out for you.
My UID is a palindrome, that must be good for some type of prize.
Holy shit, have we just slashdotted the NSA? I can't reach the article.
Careful now you might piss of some Vietnamese twins in South Africa if you mention that again.
The problem is that if you start to allow some things to be sold without being destroyed, the possibility that something is classified incorrectly, and thus has data on it increases. When you are dealing with TS/SCI shit, you just don't take the risk.
When it comes to spy games, there's no such thing as "parinoid enough".
So, since the NSA doesn't provide instructions on how to secure a Linux computer, they're either saying Linux is so good it doesn't need to be secured (yay slashdot mentality) or its red commie software that no freedom-loving american would dare use
Part of it is that they pretty much have to spend their budget, or it'll get reduced during the next cycle.
The other thing is, lets say that they rip out all the HD's and RAM in order to auction off the hardware... well, someone has to do that, someone has to file a bunch of paperwork (in triplicate, everything is in triplicate), someone else is going to file the paperwork that's just been generated, someone else has to make sure the HD's & RAM get destroyed, more paperwork...
The costs can snowball very quickly. It may seriously be cheaper to de-mill the stuff and buy it again.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.