A US Senate probe has once again outlined the woeful state of computer and information security within Uncle Sam's civil service.
A committee report (PDF) examining a decade of internal audits this week concluded that outdated systems, unpatched software, and weak data protection are so widespread that it's clear American bureaucrats fail to meet even basic security requirements.
To produce this damning dossiers[sic], the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations pored over a decade of findings from inspector-general-led probes into information security practices within the Department of Homeland Security, State Department, Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Agriculture, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the Social Security Administration.
Of those eight organizations, seven were found to be unable to adequately protect personally identifiable information stored on their systems, six were unable to properly patch their systems against security threats, five were in violation of IT asset inventory-keeping requirements, and all eight were using either hardware or software that had been retired by the vendor and was no longer supported.
"Despite major data breaches like OPM, the federal government remains unprepared to confront the dynamic cyber threats of today," the report noted.
"The longstanding cyber vulnerabilities consistently highlighted by Inspectors General illustrate the federal government's failure to meet basic cybersecurity standards to protect sensitive data."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @07:41PM (1 child)
Does no one consider connecting directly to the wired Ethernet as an option? Any device used for REAL work should be able to do that.
Handing your files over to some "cloud" host is just epically retarded, even if you think the stuff is encrypted and they promise to not look at it. Personally I don't trust wifi so I can see why they don't allow access to anything other than web.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @08:58PM
Didn't Apple get rid of all sockets on their laptops, like, years ago?