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Congress Gives Federal Agencies Two Weeks To Tally Backdoored Juniper Kit (csoonline.com)
itwbennett writes: In an effort to gauge the impact of the recent Juniper ScreenOS backdoors on government organizations, the House of Representatives is questioning around two dozen U.S. government departments and federal agencies. The U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent letters to the agencies on Jan. 21, asking them to identify whether they used devices running the affected ScreenOS versions, to explain how they learned about the issues and whether they took any corrective actions before Juniper released patches and to specify when they applied the company's patches. The questioned organizations have until Feb. 4 to respond and deliver the appropriate documents, a very tight time frame giving that 'the time period covered by this request is from January 1, 2009 to the present.'
They should be phasing those out regardless. Netscreen devices are EOL. Too many people are still using them. I know I have actively encouraged clients to ditch them. Unfortunately the Juniper SRX firewalls are crap, at least the low end/branch ones. The big iron is alright but still doesn't compare feature wise to Check Point, Palo Alto, Fortinet, etc.
Who at Juniper is getting prosecuted for selling backdoor'd routers to the United States Federal Government?
I thought government security organisations of the three letter variety were busy trying to convince
us that security backdoors and 'special' access for government level players was a good thing?
Surely they should just be promoting this as a feature, that enables the rounding up of literally millions
of pedophiles, drug addicts, and terrorists Real Soon Now?
Oh, wait, they are not sure its only THEIR backdoors? Dont tell me other governments may also be
involved? But surely if its good for one government to have access, its better if more do - hell, they ALL
should, right? So they can enforce their own local views of What Is Right?
Are we being told only some governments are trustworthy? Can we please have a list? What happens when
governments change? This is all just too complicated!
It is a pity most police are now just too busy collecting revenue to do much police work, it all seemed a bit
simpler when they used to investigate actual crimes against the populace.
I spent much of last year responding to a security audit that had to do with a leak of personal information through email. Very few people were affected . It was an honest mistake. The audit is exhaustive.
It is hard to provide every email *relevant* message for your colleagues for years. It is hard to document everything we ever said about securing information. It's hard in a short time to prove you are educating the whole staff again about what you told them all before.
We are better for it, and my group wasn't punitive. Still, it took up about a quarter of a year for me for my unit so far..
Q: "What did you know and when did you know it?"
A: We didn't know nothin' then, we don't know nothin' now, and we won't know nothin' next week either."
"Thank you, this meeting is adjourned."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Just the republicans ...
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
Congress should just ask NSA and save everyone the trouble.
I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!
Spoiler Alert: I know what happens next. The house falls on the bitch.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Here's the letter to SSA:
There's no mention of getting information as far back as 2009 in the letter. That bit was from some attached boilerplate rules about how the committee wants the report formatted, media, etc. Other letters that have nothing to do with the Juniper firewall issue have the same boilerplate rules attached. The committee only wants the information at stated in their four items. I don't why the report for the TFA put in that bit about the 2009 timeframe other than to exaggerate the work each agency is going to have to do.
I don't know what they're complaining about, I thought they wanted backdoors?
the same morons who want to worry about THIS seem to have no problem with nearly the entire government running a combination of ancient, unmaintained and vulnerable old flavors of Windows and IE, or WORSE the newest flavors of windows that have a permanent, autonomous and continually-active "back-door" built right in. With the most-recent versions of Windows sucking-up all keystrokes and mouse moves and even, in some cases, audio from any built-in microphones, and sending stuff off to headquarters in Redmond (or mirror sites, or shell corporations, etc) should ANYBODY be comfortable with the government storing ANY personal, private, medical, tax, business, security, or other info on computers???????
People need to be hammering every member of congress about this and the government should not be running ANY computer operating system without having the full source-code to it and building it in-house to be certain the object code came from that source code.
I was thinking the same. First they start lamenting how they need government backdoors, now they complain when they find some. Make up your fucking mind, people!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
republicans don't want effective oversight of government. that runs contradictory to small government.
you can't have oversight, and small it doesn't work. Oversight by definition makes things bigger.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I know this might come as a shock to you, but the U.S. Government is very large. It does multiple things at one time. One part can have a policy contradicting another part. In some cases, the contradiction is mandated by Congress. Government is not a large company where getting out of line can get you fired. There is no line, there are fiefdoms. And you wouldn't want it any other way.