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FAA Network Hacked
coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration has joined the growing list of government agencies that have had their supposedly safe systems hacked. The agency this week notified about 45,000 employees that one of its servers was hacked into and employee personal identity information was stolen.
The FAA was quick to say the server that was accessed was not connected to the operation of the air traffic control system or any other FAA operational system. It did say two of the 48 files on the breached computer server contained personal information about more than 45,000 FAA employees and retirees who were on the FAA's rolls as of the first week of February 2006."
Our top priority is recovering the CIP device!!
...but they have said nothing to me or my wife or any of the other dozen people I know who are blissfully retired from that shit hole. Typical.
Where do you think big airlines get pilots from? Thats right, the private sector. Other than the military, the private sector is the only place you can rack up a few thousand hours needed to fly an air bus for morons like yourself.
The FAA Air Traffic equipment is never connected to any of the administrative LANs, in fact by policy any computer that is going to be connected to operational equipment is not supposed to be used on a public network.
Dear Colleagues: I want to alert you that the Cyber Security Management Center identified some unusual activity from an FAA administrative server last week. An investigation revealed that the server was breached by a hacker. Most of the 48 breached files were test files used for application development. Two of these files contained names and social security numbers. One of them contained information on more than 45,000 employees and retirees who were on FAA rolls as of the first week of February 2006. Medical information from the hacked files was encrypted and not identifiable. We are moving swiftly to identify short-term and long-term measures â" procedural and technological â" to prevent such incidents from recurring. All current and former employees who are affected will receive a letter shortly alerting them to this event. In addition, we are posting information in the form of FAQs on the employee and public web sites, and we will update that information, via the web and other channels, should the investigation reveal more information. We also are setting up a toll-free hotline to answer employee calls related to this event. We will continue our efforts to further protect our computer security systems and will keep you informed as the investigation continues. Lynne Osmus Acting FAA Administrator
A couple of things.
The FAA has been in a broad transition to becoming more secure. This is mainly pointed at the administration network, as ATC and all operations run on an internal network that in no way touches the outside world.
Some things that have happened and are happening on the admin network.
-Wirless intrusion detection (complete, alarms go off if any new wireless devices are detected)
-Network access control (will be completed soon, anything that is not registered will not touch the network)
-Encryption (all laptops are currently encrypted, workstations will be in the future)
-ID Cards (Cards readers will be used to access any machine, in progress)
-Centralized secure proxies (Proxies that were run separately and with different rules will be homogenized and secured)
I know this sounds like standard security features, but trust me...five years ago none of this stuff was standard. They (we) are getting there.