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

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.

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.