Fergie's Tech Blog

Feds' Own Hacker Cracks Homeland Security Network

Sharon Gaudin writes on InformationWeek:

Within the past year, a hacker secretly broke into the Department of Homeland Security network and deleted, updated, and captured information -- all without anyone knowing he was even in there.

Luckily, the hacker was Keith A. Rhodes, chief technologist at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Rhodes, considered to be the federal government's top hacker, has a congressional mandate to test the network security at 24 government agencies and departments. He performs 10 penetration tests a year on agencies such as the IRS and the Department of Agriculture. And for the past year, he's been testing the network at DHS.

"I would label them [DHS] as being at high risk," Rhodes told InformationWeek the day after a congressional hearing into the security of the government agency tasked with being the leader of the nation's cybersecurity. "There was no system we tested that didn't have problems. There was nothing we touched that didn't have weaknesses, ranging from WAN to desktops. ... If we had continued the audit we would have found more. We curtailed the audit because we just kept finding problems. At a certain point, we just ran out of room in our basket."

posted by Fergie @ 6/22/2007 05:42:00 AM