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FBI, US Marshals Hit By Virus
Norsefire writes "The FBI and US Marshals were forced to shut down part of their computer network after being hit by a 'mystery virus.' FBI spokesman Mike Kortan said, 'We are evaluating a network issue on our external, unclassified network that's affecting several government agencies.' Nikki Credic, spokeswoman for the US Marshals, said that no data has been compromised but the type of virus and its origin is unknown."
Although it is the FBI. Maybe they are use macs and we just don't know it.
Wasn't last week's news cycle that the Justice Department was hit by a virus that was claimed to come from an ad on DrudgeReport?
It cou
You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they hit you with a virus, you pull a gun. He sends one of your servers to the IT department, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone! Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?
This is not a coincidence, skynet is obviously behind this.
...of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, and Dr. House.
Why doesn't the government switch to Linux already? Sure, you can get a Linux virus, but to get one it takes work. On the other hand merely browsing a site in IE can give you viruses in Windows.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
the net is becoming self aware... quick, write down the internet in the notebook.
More and more, sensitive corporate and government networks will need to be isolated or at least mostly isolated from non-sensitive networks and the Internet.
They may not need an air gap but they will need to be isolated enough to prevent general problems like viruses.
They also need to be run with the philosophy of "every other machine or user on my network could become compromised (infected or bribed) at any time."
A couple of possible solutions:
*Give employees 2 computers with a KVM, one for surfing the web and access to non-secure data, one to access secure data.
*Give employees a multi-homed, ROM+read-only-USB-stick-for-configuration-data-boot "thin client" that's stripped down and hardened, with no copy-and-paste, no network bridging, and other designed way for one remote server to influence the other. Then have them connect to different servers on different networks for different needs.
If your security requirements are extreme, use an air gap.
In either case, don't forget to take countermeasures against human idiocy, ignorance, and bribery/blackmail.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every JPEG, MPEG, EXE, PXE, hard drive, flash drive and floppy drive in that area. Firewalls go up on every computer. Your fugitive's name is Neeris. Go get him.
"said that no data has been compromised but the type of virus and its origin is unknown."
How do they know that there was no data compromised if they don't even know the type of the virus?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
We need to start looking for destroyed helicopters in order to find John McLane!!
http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/news.asp?id=53225
nice RTICLE --
The spokeswoman said :
"no data has been compromised but the type of virus and its origin is unknown"
That is an extraordinary statement. How would they know ?
If I was head of IT there I would assume that that was not true. Even if there was a completely different computer system for any sensitive information, data has a way of leaking to where it shouldn't be. Of thousands of people, not one put notes or passwords or whatever on the insecure side of the line ?
Regardless of what they tell the press, I hope that internally they are assuming that this is a breach, and acting accordingly.
Please copy this file to your hard drive, decompress it, untar it, chmod it, and place an entry in the root crontab... so I can have your advice.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Tagged tommyleejones. :)
Don't tickle yourself because they don't know what's missing yet. Just waiting to hear the screams in the next few days when they do. Something tells me this is directly related to the recent Virginia medical record fiasco, and more importantly the governments complete ignorance of the incident in light of the Obama administration pushing the private healthcare industry into government mandated electronic records (only to be supplied by GE, whom financed Obama's compaign).
On a broader note: Seriously, you didn't think people would be upset by any form government oppresion? Common people, wake up.
This claim is made by nearly every spokesperson for any major organization which is forced to disclose a malware attack to the public. In nearly every case the claim cannot be substantiated. Run of the mill malware often scans hard drives and uploads data to remote servers over encrypted connections. Most organizations have no way of knowing if these even happened. They don't know how long they have been infected. They don't know if the attack is directed at them, specifically (and thus might be smarter about hiding its activity). These folk really don't know yet what the extent of the damage is. The stock line should be, "we don't know", not, "nothing bad happened". Something bad happened -- malware got on your network and spread. That much is clear.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
True, US-government-classified material does have to be regulated.
But what about the human resource database of the United States Postal Service, with its employee birth dates and social security numbers? What about the customer database at American Airlines, with its juicy collection of credit card numbers? What about your medical insurer, which may have lots of information about your or your children's health you don't want entering the public domain? What about the bank teller whose terminal let's her do almost anything with people's money?
It's probably a bad idea to let computers which have access to that kind of data, particularly write-access, to access the Internet or an unsecured network unless absolutely necessary to do the job. Sometimes, you have to allow such access if you are going to allow certain services, like allowing people to order products or services with credit cards from home, or do home banking. However, at least in these cases you can limit the potential damage to what that customer is allowed to access. If you allow people with wholesale access to sensitive databases to "work from home," give them a separate, secure computer that runs on an isolated LAN at the person's house, tunnel everything over a VPN, and block all non-VPN traffic except that needed to establish the VPN. Better yet, give them a separate real connection straight back to the corporate glass tower, bypassing the Internet entirely. Even better yet, don't let them work from home.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's known as the "fastlead" virus, and it's frequently game over if you get infected.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
US Air Force General Kevin Chilton, head of US Strategic Command, has said that attacks on the United States via the Internet could merit a conventional military response.
"I don't think you take anything off the table. We're particularly looking toward one group in Seattle."
The Seattle-based insurgent group is thought to have seeded American government and military computers with millions of copies of malware that allows attackers easy access to any data stored on the computer, or indeed to take complete control of the computer and use it for their own ends as part of a massive "botnet" to mount further attacks. The malware, "Windows," makes securing a computer running it almost impossible.
"Turning Seattle into a glass crater would only be undertaken strictly as the minimum required surgical military action," emphasised Chilton, "and not in any way out of twenty-five years' bitter resentment and frustration at computing machinery."
Chilton stressed that members of the US military must begin to think of their computers as the front lines. "Do you realize that in addition to adding Windows to computers, why, there are studies underway to Windowsize salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk ... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream! I can no longer sit back and allow Windows infiltration, Windows indoctrination, Windows subversion and the international enterprise licensing conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"
The Obama administration is currently reviewing the United States' cyberspace defense policy. "We're considering all options thoroughly," said the President, closing his MacBook and looking lingeringly at the red button on his desk.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Well, maybe some hardened versions but not the run of the mill version.
If you want hardened computing, you want:
*A hardened network, with hardened human access
*A hardened computer, with hardened human access
*A hardened OS or one that comes pre-hardened by design. SELinux, OpenBSD, some specialty flavors of MS-Windows, some small/embeded-systems OSes, some Unix-style OSes, and some mainframe-type OSes qualify
*Hardened sofware all the way around
*People who are trained in security in general and trained how to use the computer properly and how to spot people who are trying to compromise it or the network
Do you really want hardened computing?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Or does this sound like a cheap stunt to cook up funding for "cyber warface" and somesuch. Virus my butt... Some idiot probably tripped over a server power cord, sent half the FBI down, and now the bozos in charge are trying to use it as an excuse to get more taxpayer cash.
There is absolutely no tag for this article saying "haha" or anything similar? /., shocking.
Shocking
Sure some mysterious unknown virus. Or Someone broke/deleted something and didn't know how to fix it. I mean would you want to tell the FBI you broke their computers?
This is sounding more and more like Plan Nine from User Space.
700,000 desktops in the US Army are going to be upgraded to Vista.
you had me at #!
Any known vaccines ? And what is the fatality rate ?
so many virus !!! no Internet would be not much danger . http://www.nowgoal.com/17.shtml
*Give employees 2 computers with a KVM, one for surfing the web and access to non-secure data, one to access secure data.
Or use one operating system that allows different levels of security on one system, with different applications each running at different levels, and with access to variously segmented networks spanning from unclassified to top secret:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Solaris
It's called multi-level security, and the DoD already uses it.
That's why it's called the swine flu
The Navy Motto "IF it ain't broke Fix It" "A day is wasted if you don't learn something new"
Check with the lads at the CIA.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
somehow this seems related to the urine candid camera post earlier today
They're the government, they're not supposed to lie.
Maybe the virus writer is a disgruntled Pisser that didn't like DHS invading his personal pee space during a lay over in Houston?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
__STOP__ USING WINDOWS, and don't allow users to get root.
A hardened network, with hardened human access
Show me a hardened network connected to the Internet and I'll show you a self-contradiction.
I get your point though: If you are connected to the Internet, there's an upper limit on how secure you can be.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I wonder if Microsoft and some of the organizations it has hired to produce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reports take things like this into account.
If we're betting, I'll take "no."
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Stalled legislation anyone
Dood, these people are the FBI -- they know EVERYTHING (DCS 1000, plus gruvy software by number one intel contractor, S.A.I.C.). Also, I have the same false positives whenever I download porn, too......
Maybe coincidence, maybe not. I happened to be crossing the border back into the U.S. from Niagara Falls on Thursday afternoon when the Customs and Border Patrol computers at the entry port started to randomly shut down. It took over two hours of waiting for them to finally call the ATF to run our passports. Lo and behold, the FBI system was their backup! This is the side-effect of inter-agency connectivity: if you CAN successfully launch an attack, you can take down EVERYBODY.
*whoosh*
*whoosh*
See? I can do it too. Are we done yet, or would you like to play at 2-year-olds some more?
If you hardware doesn't give you the tools to implement layered security, you don't have layered security.
Even the lowly 80286 chip offered memory protection and privileged APIs.
In the mainframe world, "escaping" from a virtual machine and taking over the supervisor process was hard and absent bugs, should be impossible. Ditto breaking out of a Windows/VMWare/etc, Java, or other virtual machine.
It's worth repeating: In a system with layers like the grandparent post mentioned, either you have good security, or you don't have layered security or any security at all.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Damn! How long are they going to use that win32crap all over the critical networks? They wanted it - that got it!