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Details Emerge On the 2006 Hacking of Congress
The National Journal just published an article with details about the hacking of Congress in 2006, possibly by agents in China, though the attack's origin is uncertain. The article notes the difficult work of the House Information Systems Security Office, which must set security policies and then try to enforce them on a population of the equivalent of C-level executives. The few members who have called attention to the issue of Congressional cyber-security have been advised to shut up about it, by whom the reporter did not discover. "Armed with this information about how the virus worked, the security officers scanned the House network again. This time, they found more machines that seemed to match the profile — they, too, were infected. Investigators found at least one infected computer in a member's district office, indicating that the virus had traveled through the House network and may have breached machines far away from Washington. Eventually, the security office determined that eight members' offices were affected; in most of the offices, the virus had invaded only one machine, but in some offices, it hit multiple computers. It also struck seven committee offices, including Commerce; Transportation and Infrastructure; Homeland Security; and Ways and Means; plus the Commission on China, which monitors human rights and laws in China."
Only a paranoid totalitarian state would waste time penetrating Congress. There's not much there that isn't accessible via the news. Anyone who had half a brain would target the Executive branch, where there is data that is not publically accessible.
Silly commies.
Or maybe they just did it for the lulz?
If someone had told congressmen that buying mass-quantities of Viagra (and Vimax!) from canadian pharmacies was a bad idea, they may not have been exposed to so many security threats...
But what's a horny old-guy to do...
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody... - Dick Armey
Shhh. We can't talk about that, yet.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Or maybe they just did it for the RuRz?
There, fixed that for you.
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Imagine the potential for disaster if our elected officials were tech savvy enough to actual use technologies such as "e-mail" and the "world wide web" and that "http" thing!
"You have liberated me from thought."
Congress can be completely free of network attacks if they disconnect from the Internet, and reality....
Half way there!
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
I once sent DSS a resume containing nothing but "penispenispenis" in all of the sections, and got a reply that I should come down and take their employment test.