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US gov't wide open to cyber attacks
by Amber Perez
| May 31, 2008 |
US probes whether laptop was copied on China trip| |
Excerpt: U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary |
| | Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce computers, officials and industry experts told The Associated Press.
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This is a wild story -- if you read the article all the way through to the end you find this nugget:| |
... The Pentagon, State Department and Commerce Department all have been victimized by widespread computer intrusions blamed on China since July 2006. Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed in September that parts of the Pentagon's unclassified e-mail system -- used by Gates and hundreds of others -- were disrupted in June 2007 due to a break-in.
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The U.S. is totally vulnerable to cyberwar, and we've already lost most of our top secret shit.
Plus, with the Feds gathering information about U.S. citizens, you can bet that data pirates have access to everything the Feds have.
So the only people who are safe are the people who haven't yet been targeted, or who are homeless with nothing to lose.
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| | The Commerce Department break-ins have been so serious that its Bureau of Industry and Security, which regulates exports of sensitive technology that might be used in weapons, effectively unplugged itself from the Internet.
Workers were instructed to use a few laptops placed around the office that are isolated from the department's network, even to search for public information using Google's Web search engine.
"We have discovered a number of very serious threats to the integrity of our systems and data," wrote then-Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon to employees in an e-mail obtained by AP under the Freedom of Information Act. He said the department was not the government's only hacking victim, "but we have an obligation, which we must take seriously, to take all necessary measures to protect our systems and our data."
At the time, Foulon acknowledged that some of the protective measures "may create difficulties and even reduce productivity."
Fully one year after being unplugged from the Internet, some Commerce Department employees complained about the inconvenience. One worker offered to provide his own laptop so he could work at his desk, rather than use one of the office terminals 30 feet away. "How that endanger the network?" the employee wrote last summer. His request was denied by a security supervisor who complained that he, too, was struggling with the same Internet restrictions. |
First off, the main incident in the article, the suspect hacking of Carlos M. Gutierrez' laptop, tells us that the US government is totally out of control. They shouldn't even be issuing laptops to government employees -- so many are lost or misused, giving out laptops is like hiring spies.
Secondly, I don't think the U.S. government should even be using the internet, except on isolated servers dishing up information to the public. We know by now that no computer connected to the internet is safe, especially if the users are kinda clueless :-)
There are so many concerns now about computer security! Recently a way to build hardware security weaknesses into the computer hardware was invented. The computers can come out of the factory with built in backdoors and it is basically impossible to know (this applies to any computer tech, including that used on military systems...)
I'm just guessing here, but the U.S. is totally vulnerable to cyberwar, and we've already lost most of our top secret shit. Plus, with the Feds gathering information about U.S. citizens, you can bet that data pirates have access to everything the Feds have. So the only people who are safe are the people who haven't yet been targeted, or who are homeless with nothing to lose.
I think we are completely fucked. This is really, really bad.
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Amber Perez
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