US Government IT Security 'Outstandingly Mediocre'

mrneutron2004 writes wrote with a link to an article on The Register, discussing an annual IT security report card handed out to the federal government. The results this year were mixed. The good news is that they graded higher than last year. The bad news? They still just rate a C-". Individual departments did better than others, but overall the results were quite poor. "Although overall security procedures improved the Department of Defense (DoD) recorded a failing F grade. Meanwhile the Department of Veterans Affairs - whose loss of laptops containing veterans' confidential data triggered a huge security breach - failed to submit a report. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, another agency that has trouble keeping track of its PCs, flunked."

Comments

FISMA is not security

[brennz]

The grades are on FISMA compliance which is not really the same thing as computer security. This is more about documentation than anything else.......

It is about having documented down to the letter networks, configurations, policies and procedures for everything.

Another weakness is how "controls" are rated. Basically, missing one little policy or procedure is rated as bad as missing something as critical as secure configurations...

Every agency IG has a vested interest in scoring down agency efforts.

If you look too, the ratings are biased because small agencies & independents have inordinately high ratings, while the bigger agencies/departments have far worse ratings.

Re:FISMA is not security

[Blakey Rat]

The article I read had a great quote from the Congressman who initiated this program (whose name I can't remember, unfortunately.) He said that you can't possibly secure a system you don't know about, which is why the first metric is whether all networks/servers in use by the agency are documented in a centralized manner. It seems like a great first step to me.

Re:Government

[HomelessInLaJolla]

The only solution is to stop giving them money and confine them to the strictest interpretation of the 9th and 10th amendments possible.

No Department Left Behind?

[Wyzard]

Clearly the White House should launch a "No Department Left Behind" initiative to improve the government's IT security grades.

It could begin with routine penetration testing to assess how well-defended systems are against known and common attacks -- one could call this "standardized testing" to establish a minimum level of security, with budget cuts for departments that fail to keep their networks secure. The results should be reported to the taxpayers, so that we know which systems are secure and which are not, and can put public pressure on departments that aren't keeping their grades up. And of course, all IT managers should have MCSE, CCNA, RHCE, and A+ certifications, to prove that they're qualified for their jobs.

Re:Government

[HomelessInLaJolla]

There's a fine point there. No, the government does not print the money. The government buys the printed money from the Federal Reserve, which is a coalition of private bankers. When we look at the federal debt, and see that the federal government is $8.8 trillion dollars in debt, it's no different than a home loan. The federal government is $8.8 trillion dollars in debt to a bank which is allowed to set all the terms of repayment--including the interest rates used for all other major financial transactions in the nation.

We're all slaves! Yes, yes, yes we are.

Windows

[slayermet420]

As an active duty US Marine, I honestly feel that the big problem is the Windows culture, including the fact that the majority of the Marine Corps is using Windows 2000, with IE 6. Of course, it's viewed as too difficult to use XP, or at least that's the excuse. And until then, IE 7 will never be seen by the Marine Corps. And of course, user training is incredibly low. The majority of users know very little about computers, and don't get much training, if any at all. I'm definitely not surprised that the DoD got an "F" on security.

Re:Windows

[Bios_Hakr]

That's kind of a cop-out. Just saying that a platform leads to insecurity is missing a big part of the problem.

I've worked with USMC, USAF, and NATO workstations and servers. Both CLASS and UNCLASS.

The first thing the DoD does right is to remove desktop admin rights. I love the fact that we lock workstations pretty hard. If your shop follows the NSA guidelines for Win2k, it's pretty solid. Ideally, the user cannot WRITE to any part of the drive other than his home folders. Of course, a rights-elevating script can destroy that.

The USMC started enforcing standard text emails. They also push cryptographic signing and public-key encryption. Fery few civilian companies do that.

The second thing the DoD does right is in user training. We (used to) regularly call people and ask for their password. If they gave it out, their commander got bitched at. He usually ensured that everyone came in on Saturday to practice not giving out passwords...

The DoD also tends to filter out web sites. There are some places that only allow .mil/gov access. More common is blocking of Asian and Eastern-European IP addresses at the gateway routers. If a phishing site is identified, we usually block entire Class-Cs without a second thought. If the users have a problem, we whitelist on an as-needed basis.

The DoD also filters email attachments. Sometimes this is strange. I can send a Word document with 9000 macros, but a basic Visio diagram gets blocked. Zipping, Raring, or Taring a file isn't usually enough to get through the filters.

The DoD also segregates their critical communications. Everyone loves email and Google, but we can still deploy bombs and bullets without Wikipedia. All our *good stuff* is completely inaccessible from the internets.

The biggest flaw is, as you said, using outdated software. However, there is no easy way around this. Once MS releases a patch, the DoD has to decide if it's needed. Then they have to decide if it will break anything. Form there, they filter it to the USMC. They decide if they need it and if it will break anything. This continues to happen all the way down to the Base communication support people. By that time, the exploit has been in the wild for a few months.

The only real alternative is to *cowboy* your way through the patches and hope that nothing breaks.

Relative to what?

[djpretzel]

While from my experience a lot of fed workstations and servers are indeed running Windows, they have it so locked down and neutered that it's almost secure by virtue of being unusable. I've witnessed some pretty Draconian measures for locking down machines, red tape up the wazoo for change management, and detailed Certification & Accreditation procedures for moving IT systems into production and changing them. Relative to quite a bit of what I've seen in private industry, there's actually better security measures in place at multiple levels... Furthermore, in many cases security policies and systems themselves are being developed and certified by private industry contractors, many of whom are really rather sharp. They have no interest in being lazy when it comes to finding things to make more secure or criticize, because it means more revenue. I'd question how most private companies would fair if analyzed under these same FISMA regulations, or - since the article's on The Register - how the British government would rate.

Re:Correlation with usage of Microsoft products

[zerkon]

As far as I've seen in my military career, the AF at least uses windows exclusively. I don't think that they have anything against Linux, maybe there are just too few nerds among the top brass to even consider a change.

My degree is in IT, and I can tell you a lot of what /.ers would consider horror stories about standing AF computer policies. As an example, my password is something like 15 characters long, has non-alphanumerics, numbers, capitals, and changes every 60 days or something like that.

I really think the problem isn't so much an unwillingness to change as it is just the people at the top not understanding or knowing about other options and how computer security is supposed to work. And/or knee-jerk reactions by decision makers to threats without really understanding the consequences (I suppose a lot of them are nerds too, probably civilian employees, I bet I'll get a few comments saying what's wrong with a 15 character password). I tell people my PDA (nokia 770) runs Linux and they're like cool... what's that?

I'm just hoping someday I have enough brass on my shoulders to be able to make a difference...

Re:Government

[omeomi]

When we look at the federal debt, and see that the federal government is $8.8 trillion dollars in debt, it's no different than a home loan.

I wonder what will happen when the government can't make the payments, and the banks foreclose and take the country away on the back of a really big truck...it'd make a good reality show, anyway...