US Government IT Security 'Outstandingly Mediocre' 86
mrneutron2004 writes wrote with a link to an article on The Register, discussing an annual IT security report card handed out to the federal government. The results this year were mixed. The good news is that they graded higher than last year. The bad news? They still just rate a C-". Individual departments did better than others, but overall the results were quite poor. "Although overall security procedures improved the Department of Defense (DoD) recorded a failing F grade. Meanwhile the Department of Veterans Affairs - whose loss of laptops containing veterans' confidential data triggered a huge security breach - failed to submit a report. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, another agency that has trouble keeping track of its PCs, flunked."
FISMA is not security (Score:3, Interesting)
It is about having documented down to the letter networks, configurations, policies and procedures for everything.
Another weakness is how "controls" are rated. Basically, missing one little policy or procedure is rated as bad as missing something as critical as secure configurations...
Every agency IG has a vested interest in scoring down agency efforts.
If you look too, the ratings are biased because small agencies & independents have inordinately high ratings, while the bigger agencies/departments have far worse ratings.
Re:FISMA is not security (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
I've worked with USMC, USAF, and NATO workstations and servers. Both CLASS and UNCLASS.
The first thing the DoD does right is to remove desktop admin rights. I love the fact that we lock workstations pretty hard. If your shop follows the NSA guidelines for Win2k, it's pretty solid. Ideally, the user cannot WRITE to any part of the drive other than his home folders. Of course, a rights-elevating script can destroy that.
The USMC started enforcing standard text emails. They also push cryptographic signing and public-key encryption. Fery few civilian companies do that.
The second thing the DoD does right is in user training. We (used to) regularly call people and ask for their password. If they gave it out, their commander got bitched at. He usually ensured that everyone came in on Saturday to practice not giving out passwords...
The DoD also tends to filter out web sites. There are some places that only allow
The DoD also filters email attachments. Sometimes this is strange. I can send a Word document with 9000 macros, but a basic Visio diagram gets blocked. Zipping, Raring, or Taring a file isn't usually enough to get through the filters.
The DoD also segregates their critical communications. Everyone loves email and Google, but we can still deploy bombs and bullets without Wikipedia. All our *good stuff* is completely inaccessible from the internets.
The biggest flaw is, as you said, using outdated software. However, there is no easy way around this. Once MS releases a patch, the DoD has to decide if it's needed. Then they have to decide if it will break anything. Form there, they filter it to the USMC. They decide if they need it and if it will break anything. This continues to happen all the way down to the Base communication support people. By that time, the exploit has been in the wild for a few months.
The only real alternative is to *cowboy* your way through the patches and hope that nothing breaks.
Re:Correlation with usage of Microsoft products (Score:3, Interesting)
My degree is in IT, and I can tell you a lot of what
I really think the problem isn't so much an unwillingness to change as it is just the people at the top not understanding or knowing about other options and how computer security is supposed to work. And/or knee-jerk reactions by decision makers to threats without really understanding the consequences (I suppose a lot of them are nerds too, probably civilian employees, I bet I'll get a few comments saying what's wrong with a 15 character password). I tell people my PDA (nokia 770) runs Linux and they're like cool... what's that?
I'm just hoping someday I have enough brass on my shoulders to be able to make a difference...