US Government to Have Only 50 Gateways

Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about the US government's plan to reduce the roughly 4,000 active internet connections used by its civilian agencies to a mere 50 highly secure gateways. This comes as part of the government's response to a rise in attacks on its networks. "Most security professionals agreed that the TIC security improvements and similar measures are long overdue. 'We should have done this five years ago, but there wasn't the heart or the will then like there is now,' said Howard Schmidt, a former White House cyber security adviser. 'The timetable is aggressive,' he said, but now there is a sense of urgency behind the program. Small agencies that won't qualify for their own connections under TIC must subcontract their Internet services to larger agencies."

Comments

Blocklists

[kylehase]

In other words, please remove those 4000 IP addresses from your PeerGuardian/firewall blocklist.

Newbie Mistake

[SilentOneNCW]

You'll never get enough Zealots out with only fifty Gateways...

Re:Great Wall of China

[iamdrscience]

I tried to think of counter-examples to your point and I had trouble, but in the process I stumbled across an even better idea. The first thing I thought of was cages at the zoo. To some extent, this example shows your point because the barriers at zoos are designed much more to keep animals in than spectators out. However, despite being designed to keep animals in, they are just as successful at keeping people out. Why is this? Partly it's because zoos make it difficult for people to get inside cages, but mostly it's because inside the cages are dangerous animals. At this point, inspiration struck: if dangerous tigers can keep people out of a cage at the zoo, couldn't they also be used to protect a computer network? Of course they could! Who would risk hacking a network if it meant getting eaten alive by tigers?

As far as a practical implementation, I imagine that behind the network's regular firewall, one would just place a container of tigers (a "Tigerbox") that way. The firewall will work as a general security measure, but if a hacker were to break through into the network, he would be immediately eviscerated by tigers. I suppose that in theory, one could even get rid of the firewall entirely, like you suggest, and protect the network entirely with tigers. I'm not sure how practical this would be, due to the increased number of tigers required. However, it might be feasible in a few years once tigerboxes are more popular and the market begins to flood with cheap commodity tigers.

Re:Hopefully this will work out better

[iamsamed]

hundreds of powerful computers at the Department of Defense

So THAT explains all of the 'enlarge your gun' spam!

Everybody's so cynical here

[roystgnr]

But just give it a chance! I hear the new Maginot-brand routers are great.

Re:Great Wall of China

[frdmfghtr]

As far as a practical implementation, I imagine that behind the network's regular firewall, one would just place a container of tigers (a "Tigerbox") that way.

Wouldn't you want to use something more recent, like Leopardboxes?

Re:DoS???

[ColdWetDog]

Heck, I'd be willing to bet that productivity within said agencies would go UP while the links were down!

A truly excellent idea. When (if) they finish this project, it should be pretty trivial to have an "Internet-free day" at Government agencies. No Dilbert! No Slashdot! Just actually do something!

On second thought, this may not be such a good idea. Carry on.