Fergie's Tech Blog

Reports of U.S. Federal Breaches Double

A UPI newswire article by Shaun Waterman, via The Washington Times, reports that:

The White House Office of Management and Budget says the number of computer security breaches reported by federal network managers more than doubled last year, largely because of improved reporting of such incidents.

Federal departments and agencies touted these figures and other findings in a report to lawmakers released over the weekend. The report also found that the threat to government computer systems was "shifting from opportunistic hacking to targeted, dynamically adapting attacks," and acknowledged that "a long-term architectural road map is necessary to provide a consistent strategy for mitigating malicious cyber-activity."

Departments and agencies reported 12,986 security incidents last year to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, the monitoring center based at the Department of Homeland Security. That was up from 5,146 reported incidents in 2006.

The two categories of incidents that grew the fastest were "improper usage" — which soared fivefold from 638 to 3,305 — and "under investigation" — which rose fourfold from 912 to 4,056.

posted by Fergie @ 3/05/2008 12:28:00 PM