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800 Break-ins at Dept. of Homeland Security
WrongSizeGlass writes "Yahoo is reporting about the computer security nightmare going on at the Department of Homeland Security. Senior DHS officials admitted to Congress that over a two year period there were 800 hacker break-ins, virus outbreaks and in one instance, hacker tools for stealing passwords and other files were found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems. I guess it's true what they say ... a mechanic's car is always the last to get fixed."
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I guess it's true what they say ... a mechanic's car is always the last to get fixed.
That's very true.
Especially when the mechanic is incompetent, and more interested in throwing around political weight than actually trying to accomplish anything useful.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The people that are smart enough to really do this IT stuff properly for the DHS are smart enough to earn more money elsewhere.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
...that failed to deliver when it came to 9/11 warnings by layering on a new bureaucracy on top of the failed bureaucracy.
Clearly what we need is a new Dept. of Homeland Security Security.
Point 1: Considering the complete inability of standard technical solutions to security problems to prevent a significant number of attacks/infections from being successful, this is not like the mechanics car getting fixed last. It's called "the security industry and standard methodologies continue their long history of consistent failure at organizations, both public and private"
Point 2: Those numbers are a completely meaningless abstraction without tying them back to type of attack, actual damage, importance of the data on those systems or their roles in launching further attacks, what kind of infections occurred and their damage potential, and finally what those numbers look like compared to other orgs of the same size.
Point 3: Homeland Security is comprised of multiple mostly-independant sub orgs (like Coast Guard, TSA, etc)....so..saying DHS had so many attacks is misleading without clarification
Point 4: Not saying theyre not making mistakes, just that those "facts" dont tell you either way what the actual state of things is.
DHS was started by a number of folks from the marines (I worked for one). They were ALL windows believers ( but the ones that I knew were very so-so in the tech work). They were adamant about not being like NSA in spite of the fact that NSA has 2 missions; 1) obtain any info that they can on others 2) secure our boxes. NSA has a LARGE number of mathematicians as well as computer geeks. And windows is only allowed in none secured arenas or have their network capability severed at a hardware level (i.e. no nic or usb). If DHS had been ran by professionals and not politicians from the military (ALL of the tops one were W.s, Cheney's and esp. Rumsfeld's friend), then they would not have had the break-ins.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Kinda like "War on Terror"?
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
they are charged with protecting the computing infrastructure of the country.
What's Chinese for "pwned"?
Blank until
...that you could fly a 747 through!
Oops, that was in bad taste.
technical writing / development
DHS was created in response to the 9/11 attacks as a purely political move to make it look like we were serious about fighting terrorism. It created a huge bureaucracy, gave it an impossibly broad mandate, and made it more difficult for existing agencies (that were moved under DHS because they were at least tangentially related to protecting the country against various things) to do their jobs. As a result, the government is far less capable of intelligently defending against attack than it was before. It is only capable of wildly overreacting to perceived threats (like someone slipping through airport security with 4 ounces of hand soap rather than the mandated maximum of 3), again so it can appear as if it is on top of things.
DHS was a bad idea that was implemented poorly out of a panicked need to do *something* following the attacks.
Gotta agree with that. If they were competent, they'd have their own house in order.
Just as anyone here who's competent with a computer has their systems up-to-date and tuned.