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Ransomware Completely Shuts Down Ohio Town Government (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In another interesting example of what happens when you don't manage your backups correctly, the Licking County government offices, including the police force, have been shut down by ransomware. Although details are sparse, it's clear that someone in the office caught a bug in a phishing scam or by downloading it and now their servers are locked up. Wrote Kent Mallett of the Newark Advocate: "The virus, accompanied by a financial demand, is labeled ransomware, which has hit several local governments in Ohio and was the subject of a warning from the state auditor last summer. All county offices remain open, but online access and landline telephones are not available for those on the county system. The shutdown is expected to continue at least the rest of the week." The county government offices, including 911 dispatch, currently must work without computers or office phones. "The public can still call 911 for emergency police, fire or medical response," wrote Mallett.
No. Only everyone working in IT should be fired.
How about whomever overrode the IT department with regards to security?
"Nah, that makes it too hard to do our jobs. Just use one shared admin account that is always logged in on all machines, so we can just do whatever we need to..."
Treason is vacuous in this context (and all others right now).
Article III, Section 3:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.
No one in this matter is a United States citizen who has declared war against the United States. The last time that happened was the Civil War.
The United States does not have any enemies. There is no list of enemies. The last time the United States had an enemies list was World War II.
This also explains why Snowden could not be charged with treason.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
most of these same commenters also want to "shrink government", "cut taxes", etc. NONE of which is going to: improve training and testing; expand, fund and enforce standards across municipalities; enhance LEO capabilities to track and prosecute attackers. But - Hey! - we get to sound awful tough!!
Actually, it is not difficult to accomplish both. For example, you could shrink government substantially by implementing a national retail sales tax (lots of conservative lawmakers have proposals, so there plenty of choices) and replacing the entire IRS with something like a 10-20 person office responsible for processing sales tax receipts (this would actually be super easy since sales tax is already collected in something like 99.9% of the US). You could also eliminate entire executive departments that don't actually do anything productive (like education; seriously, the more money the federal government spends on education, the worse it gets, so we should try something different). Those two changes alone would free up considerable funding to apply to the items you list and would result in a net smaller federal government that is also leaner (as defined by doing more of what government should do, like LEO, and less of what it shouldn't, like anything not specifically listed in the constitution). And that is without even touching the sacred cows of social security and medicare.