FEMA Phones Hacked, Calls Made To Mideast and Asia

purplehayes writes "A hacker broke into a Homeland Security Department telephone system over the weekend and racked up about $12,000 in calls to the Middle East and Asia. The hacker made more than 400 calls on a Federal Emergency Management Agency voicemail system in Emmitsburg, Md., on Saturday and Sunday, according to FEMA spokesman Tom Olshanski."

Comments

Re:Who hacks phones anymore?

[hal9000(jr)]

because phones, and more likely modems attached to stuff, still provide reliable ways to break into systems.

You kids and your IP telephony. Get off my lawn!

Who is valuing these minutes?

[Sir_Real]

Twelve Grand?! Is this another indicator of inflation? Who is billing this out? For 12 grand the phone companies should give you a phone that will work for life, from anywhere, to anywhere. Are the same people responsible for claiming that a quarter of schwag has a "street value" of fifty grand?

Default password?

[bsaxberg]

What are the odds he/she used a default password to gain access? I mean this is the government we are talking about here.

Re:Who hacks phones anymore?

[sm62704]

I saw this on Yahoo news this morning (and submitted it, apparently my submission wasn't the first). It looked to me like the purpose of the hack was to discredit the DHS, which is FEMA's parent organization.

Note that all the calls went to middle east countries, including Afghanistan and Yemen, both Taliban havens. IMO the hacker did the US a great service by exposing FEMA's incompetence. Katrina is fading in folks' memories and "Brownie", who took the fall for that cluster fuck, is long gone but the agency is still apparently still incredibly dysfunctional and run by incompetents.

Excellence and failure both start at the top. When the head guy is incompetent, he will hire incompetents.

Re:Hacker?

[cparker15]

this is the AP....you expect them to get that right?

No, but I do expect Slashdot to get it right.

Re:Who hacks phones anymore?

[dfetter]

Katrina is fading in folks' memories and "Brownie", who took the fall for that cluster fuck, is long gone but the agency is still apparently still incredibly dysfunctional and run by incompetents.

That's true of most of the government. All the more reason to reduce the government's role in our lives rather than expand it.

This is the "piss on you an say it's raining" school of government indulged in by the Bushies and all their forbears back to Goldwater. When you deliberately place incompetents in government, you undermine it. There's nothing essential about incompetence anywhere, not even that giant bastion of incompetence, big business.

Excellence and failure both start at the top. When the head guy is incompetent, he will hire incompetents.

The truth is that the government will always be inept and inefficient regardless of who's at the top. But having someone at the top that you don't like makes you more prone to be more critical of the entire government apparatus even though the majority of the government apparatus does not change from administration to administration.

There is much better evidence for incompetent (but nonetheless gigantically paid) CEOs than for incompetent public servants. Public servants are subject to sunshine laws that would make the aforementioned CEOs run away screaming in terror. Libertarian duckspeak like the above paragraph just looks more and more ridiculous each year.