Michael Gracie

With breaches of all shapes and sizes occuring at the government level, you would think someone would get their act together. You are hoping (if you’re a Democrat), you are praying (if you are a Republican), and you are drooling if you are either a security industry investor or an outside crisis public relations firm with a federal contract.

Nevertheless, don’t hold your breath that the latest encryption declarations are going to change things much - securing government data is going to take a while.

After hearing that the IRS website was the target of a phishing exploit, I had to frown. The IRS is using URL forwarding on its Govbenefits.gov website (the name of which is an oxymoron in itself), and phishers are taking advantage of the fact to forward folks to their own scam sites.

I have always had good experiences with the IRS (which is an easy task if you don’t cheat). But reputations precede themselves, and if your organization lacks accountablility to its patrons, there is no reason to think too long and hard about the consequences of your decisions. Maybe phishers figured that if the IRS is cavorting with Choicepoint, there just HAVE to be some holes in their systems.

The US Government is far away from getting its act together regarding network security. Some branches of government have been making some choices regarding battening down the hatches, but the general consensus is that federal agencies have no clue as to how to stop computer security threats.

Now, from the same GAO report that found agencies woefully unprepared, we find that a lot of government workers are falling victim to phishing exploits. Furthermore, a big part of the solution needs to revolve around reporting threats internally, and government workers fail in that regard as well.

If I was still getting beaten up by Nigerian 419 scams, I’d be too embarrassed to report it too!

The US Government’s accounting office just released a report detailing how woefully unprepared government agencies are to handle computer security issues. Little has been done to prevent daily threats such as spyware and spam, and coordinated cybersecurity threats such as large botnet attacks could pose more serious problems for multiple government agencies.

It makes you wonder how the Department of Homeland Security could ever hope to stop any hackers.