Fergie's Tech Blog

House Committee Grills DHS on Information Security

Jaikumar Vijayan writes on ComputerWorld:

Bennie Thompson, (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, joined other committee members in sending a letter to Scott Charbo, the CIO at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seeking answers to 13 questions pertaining to information security at the agency.

In the letter, Thompson and other members cited a subcommittee hearing held last month into hacking incidents at the Departments of State and Commerce last year and said they are concerned that similar incidents might be occurring within DHS networks. "These incidents jeopardize the integrity of our government's information," they said in the letter, which was publicly released today.

In their letter, committee members are seeking information on the number of security incidents reported by the DHS to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) and the number of cyberattacks that it had suffered between 2004 and 2007. The DHS was also asked to classify the attacks based on their severity, together with a listing of all incidents not reported to the CERT.

posted by Fergie @ 5/01/2007 03:16:00 PM