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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."
The hacker was in New Orleans. So they were obligated by official policy to ignore his calls.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Shouldn't this be 'phreaker'? The article even states the break-in was over their PBX (i.e. a convential phone system, not VoIP).
ilovegeorgebush
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!
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?
He kept calling that damned annoying Verizon guy.
"You're in Thailand now? Can you hear me now?"
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
DHS is like the laughing stock of government security. Being PBX Phreaked with a 15 year old hack is just bad... Hope the next administration isn't this incompetent.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
What are the odds he/she used a default password to gain access? I mean this is the government we are talking about here.
400 calls totalling $12,000.
That is, about $30 per call.
And from the article: "Most of the calls were about three minutes long, but some were as long as 10 minutes."
As long as 10 minutes? Not only did FEMA have a badly configured phone system, they must have had some of the crappiest call plans I could possibly imagine. I mean, where were the calls terminating? The moon?
Your tax dollars at work.
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So he doesn't have a Skype account?
Pfft! Who needs Skype when you have the FEMA Phone! Yes! With the FEMA Phone you can call anywhere in the World for FREE! And if you act now, you can get your own FEMA Trailer for Free!
Subject to criminal prosecution and penalties. Offerer is not responsible for purchaser's stupidity.
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.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Olshanski did not know who the contractor was or what hole specifically was left open, but he assured the hole has since been closed.
"I don't know who it was or what they did or didn't do, but I assure you they fixed it."
It should be pointed out that FEMA used to be a very competant organization before GWBush merged it into his Department of Fatherland Security and cut it's budget.
If you haven't noticed, the best way to get a bigger budget and more power is to be incompetent. That's the supposed reason why DHS was created in the first place.
If you subsidize stupidity, that is all you'll ever get.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
I'm sure there's a flaw in that theory, but I just can't put my finger on it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd like to offer a dissenting opinion on the FEMA issue in New Orleans. States are supposed to have some kind of emergency preparedness of their own. It's not enough to just fall apart and beg for FEMA to save you. FEMA's traditional role has been to show up late and provide sustaining support in the aftermath of an event, not to be the first responders at the moment of crisis. Many other states understand this. Texas (a nearby neighbor who ended up bearing the brunt of the NO disaster refugees) for example rarely needs FEMA - when hurricanes head for Texas, they deploy their local resources to remedy the immediate situation.
The problem with the NO disaster was not FEMA. The problem was the bankrupt, ineffective, unprepared, and completely corrupt local and state governments in the area who had nothing to offer their citizens when disaster struck.
11*43+456^2
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.
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.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
What's scary is that I read the disclaimer at 3x actual talking speed.
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