State Department CIO Interviewed About Post-Wikileaks Changes

CowboyRobot writes, quoting Information Week: "Eighteen months after its diplomatic cables were exposed in the WikiLeaks breach, the State Department continues to lock down its confidential information, while increasing its use of using social media. The agency is deploying new security technology, including auditing and monitoring tools that detect anomalous activity on the State Department's classified networks and systems. State has also begun tagging information with metadata to enable role-based access to those who need it, and is planning to implement public key infrastructure on its classified systems by the summer of 2014. This is all taking place despite the recent announcement that the IT budget will be cut by nearly 5%."

Comments

Would this stuff had helped?

[duffbeer703]

At the end of the day, Bradley Manning was a mental trainwreck in a myriad of ways. This wasn't a secret -- he was in the process of being drummed out of the military before his arrest. Seems to me that the human half of the system failed -- someone in Manning's state of crisis should have been cutoff from access to weapons or critical information at some point.

Re:Would this stuff had helped?

[dakohli]

You have hit the nail on the head

Many security breaches can be prevented if we just follow the guidelines that are in place. If you look at the case of Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Delisle there were some indicators such as his divorce and bankruptcy which are red flags.

In Delisle's case he was caught, but it is not clear how much info he sold.

Yet a third case of Security Officials dropping the ball is John Walker who I believe was turned in by his wife. This guy at one point didn't even try to keep his clearance updated!

So, in the end it falls to the procedures we have in place. If we don't consistently follow them, we pay the consequences.

Re:Shutting the Barn Door

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Yeah, he probably should have specified the unspoken ellipses there--i.e. ...

"We want Federal agencies to begin sharing as much data as they can. ...With each other... "

In all fairness, SECDEF probably assumed the people he was talking to were competent enough to fill in the blanks (you know, the part about not revealing the data to the Chinese mafia, for example.) Obviously, that assumption was a mistake.