Civil Servant Watching Porn At Work Blamed For Government Malware Outbreak (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A U.S. government network was infected with malware thanks to one employee's "extensive history" of watching porn on his work computer, investigators have found. The audit, carried out by the U.S. Department of the Interior's inspector general, found that a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) network at the EROS Center, a satellite imaging facility in South Dakota, was infected after an unnamed employee visited thousands of porn pages that contained malware, which downloaded to his laptop and "exploited the USGS' network." Investigators found that many of the porn images were "subsequently saved to an unauthorized USB device and personal Android cell phone," which was connected to the employee's government-issued computer. Investigators found that his Android cell phone "was also infected with malware." The findings were made public in a report earlier this month but buried on the U.S. government's oversight website and went largely unreported.

Comments

Not the only one at blame

[Somebody Is Using My]

The porn-watcher might have been the patient-zero of this outbreak, but I think as much if not more blame needs be laid at the feet of the IT staff that allowed the malware to get as far as it did. Limit user privileges, lock down access ports and use secure operating systems and the damage would not have been as severe; it might only have been limited to that single user's machine.

But that sort of thinking would require a costly revamping of the entire computer infrastructure, so better to put the blame on a single user, who could just as easily have gotten the malware from an ad on a perfectly legitimate site. Fortunately, he was viewing porn (naked bodies entwined together! The most evil threat America has ever faced!) so it's easy to throw him to the wolves.

Re: Single Rogue Host

[cayenne8]

Why would you fire the employee who committed a relatively unimportant and meaningless act when the real problem is in the security system, or even in the overtly infected porn industry?

Your priorities are entirely wrong, as usual for somebody who lacks perspective.

Seriously?

My base perspective is...the idiot is getting paid my MY (and yours) tax dollars, and I"m guessing the job description says nothing about surfing porn on the federal dollar?

Are you telling me that someone that did this very same thing in the private sector wouldn't be canned in a new york minute??

Seriously...are you saying you think it is acceptable to surf porn at work?

Sure, better security, that's a given, but you think this person should not be held directly responsible for doing something that EVERYONE knows they are not supposed to do at work on the clock on work computers.

Hell, government computers come with all kinds of warnings the second you try to log onto them, it isn't like anyone on a federal computer wouldn't know this a forbidden thing to do.....