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Gee, I’m glad these folks now
Jon,
IDIOTS!
There that comment wasn’t so polite was it.
Regards,
Jim
PS HANG KOSKINEN BY HIS THUMBS! (or something more painful).
We obviously need additional Chinese checkers.
Is there anyone here at Ricochet who believes that a bureaucratic institution becomes more efficient as it becomes bigger? This is only going to get worse. Think, IRS, VA, NSA, OPM, and TSA as just a few current examples. Should put State Department in there as well, just sayin’.
Of course our government is incompetent. Nearly every government is incompetent. Mali has a navy. Greece has a Ministry of Finance. Syria has a Board of Tourism. The front line defense for American freedom is our military, but the final bulwark isn’t our Constitution, our institutions, our traditions, or our indomitable spirit. It is the fact that the average government employee couldn’t find his own butt with an anatomy book in one hand and a pointy stick in the other.
This is fantastic news for those of us who believe that the government should install high-speed rail everywhere. There is nothing more competent than a faceless crowd of tens of thousands of dumpy middle-aged hacks spending billions of dollars that they themselves do not own, and are not accountable for.
At one government site I am aware of, a Windows server was deployed on an internal network and was compromised in less than 24 hours by outside hackers. In trying to apply all of the necessary patches for all of the necessary software, enough incompatibilities between patches were found to extend the effort to several man months. To patch one server using only Microsoft software.
The Navy procured a service wide IT provider, forced all commands (with varying levels of speed and success) onto the monolithic contract with a fixed set of prices. The prices included a flat charge for cleaning a malware compromised laptop that was three times the contract price for a new laptop and four to five times the street value of the same laptop similarly loaded and configured in the market. By law, laptops submitted for this five figure cleanup were required to be turned around within a few weeks (the precise number escapes me) to assure minimum downtime for affected personnel. The cleanup procedure was under utilized. Surprise.
A key part of the price list was to load direct charges (for products and services being directly received) with charges to compensate the IT contractor for indirect costs (network management, various categories of engineering tasks, yadda yadda) resulting in pricing distortions and unintended consequences that Richard Epstein and Rob Long could build a sitcom around.
When last I looked, this model was being propagated to all of DoD and several civilian agencies.
Well, I’m sure the Snowden leaks had nothing to do with China hacking into government databases. Absolutely nothing. Because he’s a hero, dang it, and exposing personal information about people entrusted with our nation’s secrets is just fine. Nothing will come of it. This incident doesn’t compromise our national security one drop. /sarc off
Out government hacks can’t hack it in the face of Chinese hackers who can.
Sisyphus
At one government site I am aware of, a Windows server was deployed on an internal network and was compromised in less than 24 hours by outside hackers. In trying to apply all of the necessary patches for all of the necessary software, enough incompatibilities between patches were found to extend the effort to several man months. To patch one server using only Microsoft software.
—
Whoever tried to deploy a server this way should be fired. This is not 1989.
If only our own, good super-hackers knew Kung Fu, we could combat the Chinese Menace ™.
I’m having trouble making sense of the reporting on this so far: I’ve been reading about it all morning, and obviously something very serious happened. What do you see as the connection between the Snowden leaks and this incident? I don’t understand what it might be. To your knowledge, did he release information that would have made this an easier hacking task?
I’m not understanding the story, yet. Was the hack intended to be obviously provocative? How was it detected?
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that DHS detected the breach partly through the use of an intrusion detection and prevention system known as Einstein. Einstein reportedly located the breach on the Department of Interior’s data center, which is used by multiple US agencies. I guess Einstein is better at detection than prevention.
One other point I heard from somewhere else: They say that 100k records were compromised. The odds are probably good that the real number is some large multiple of that, because 1) how can we know that they didn’t get more, and 2) the officials releasing this statement almost certainly want the smallest number possible to minimize the blowback on themselves.
From the WashPo,
“China is everywhere,” said Austin Berglas, head of cyber investigations at K2 Intelligence and a former top cyber official at the FBI’s New York field office. “They’re looking to gain social and economic and political advantage over the United States in any way they can. The easiest way to do that is through theft of intellectual property and theft of sensitive information.”
Is that not provocative? They gained access to employees’ Social Security numbers, job assignments, performance ratings and training information. They will attempt to compromise every asset we have, use every possible opportunity to dominate.
“Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared”
My first question was, who needs firing. Knowing the contractor and their customer, I do not believe the fault lay entirely with the subcontractor but that subcontractor was not part of the winning team on the recompete in any case. Government CEOs tend to be lawyers without firm grounding in the technical areas they supervise. When they are under pressure or trying to prove their authority, catastrophe abounds. I have watched this sort eviscerate their security function and then try to sweep the ensuing calamities under the rug.
SES’s think they are getting better control by staffing lawyers as CEOs. Got to keep those whirly-capped tech clowns under the thumb, you see. In fact, they are just suppressing the bad news and assuring, at best, only a brittle semblance of a proper IT practice. There are technicians who spend their entire careers in such shops, rendering them too cynical to function without very close direct supervision in a real shop.
Then there was the coding shop that had me trying to teach programming loops to their “senior engineer” of a preferred ethnic profile with a technical degree and several years of experience. That shop wasted thousands in consultant dollars trying to rectify an issue that would have flunked a student out of CompSci 101. Your tax dollars at work.
The future tense here is deceiving. They have been and continue to compromise our assets in any way possible. The Internet was not designed to be attack proof, and efforts to provide current services in a more secure fashion has proven astonishingly difficult.
Certain officials have been warning for years that it is probably not a good idea to outsource parts from China that are in every product used by the military, as well as every computer made – I remember hearing a story years ago about these parts failing, supply chain problems and compromised security. They are a communist country for God sake! They rose to the top of providing technical products and produced cheaper than anyone. Now it seems everyone is surprised, including our government! This hacking stuff is getting crazier – someone I know in state gov. said they got a letter last week that the state’s health insurance program (Blue Cross) was hacked. N. Korea hacked Hollywood. E. Europeans hacked Target and a host of other retailers.
Now our leadership in forcing everyone into a health exchange that will be going back to the IRS. We need to get back to making things in this country, or purchase from western countries and get away from doing business with those that would not blink to take us down several notches. Problem is we are so indebted to the Chinese – they have bought so much of our debt. We can’t put the genie back – and our current administration doesn’t seem to have ahold of many serious issues we are facing. Also what happened to the Republican majority that we won? No one is standing up in leadership to fix these very serious security problems! We just chase our tails.
We have moved way too fast into Internet exposed systems. Securing them is pure cops and robbers and frequently the injured party is the one with the least power to remedy the problem, the hapless citizen. This is a problem even for organizations with competent and active security programs, the average government office or Department secretary basement server is going to be totally owned. A bunch of Snowden’s leaks show an NSA dedicated to the systematic defeat of industry attempts to secure the Web. Government is what we do to ourselves together, to paraphrase the bumbling one.
Of course, what we do to ourselves on social sites is pretty extraordinary as well. And anything on the Internet is presumably shared in the age of the national security letter. If Ricochet were to receive such a letter tomorrow they would be unable to refuse, or to fight it in court, or to reveal that they had received it.
The Chinese are just one enemy of the people.