DHS Gets Another "F" In Cyber Security

An anonymous reader writes "For the third straight year, the Department of Homeland Security -- which is charged with charting the federal government's cyber security agenda -- earned a grade of "F" for computer security from a key congressional oversight committee, according to a story at Washingtonpost.com. Not only did the overall government-wide computer security grade remain flat (at a barely-passing "D+" but several agencies -- mostly those on the "front lines in the war on terror" -- actually managed to fare worse this year."

Comments

Funding

[Detritus]

Many departments are run on a shoe-string basis. While the agency, as a whole, may have received a budget increase. That may mean that 20% of the agency saw a major increase in funding, 40% saw their funding stay the same, and 40% saw a 10% cut in their budget, again. Year after year of budget cuts can be very corrosive. You lose all of your support people and the survivors get new tasks that they may not have the time or skills to do properly. The infrastructure becomes a collection of obsolete equipment held together with bubble gum and bailing wire.

At one office that I worked in, we made regular trips to the agency's excess equipment warehouse to scrounge for parts that we used to build "new" (newer) computers. That was the only way that we could obtain computing hardware. There was no money in the budget for PCs, even though we were a software development group. We provided our own hardware and software support, by necessity.