US Government to Have Only 50 Gateways 150
Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about the US government's plan to reduce the roughly 4,000 active internet connections used by its civilian agencies to a mere 50 highly secure gateways. This comes as part of the government's response to a rise in attacks on its networks.
"Most security professionals agreed that the TIC security improvements and similar measures are long overdue. 'We should have done this five years ago, but there wasn't the heart or the will then like there is now,' said Howard Schmidt, a former White House cyber security adviser. 'The timetable is aggressive,' he said, but now there is a sense of urgency behind the program. Small agencies that won't qualify for their own connections under TIC must subcontract their Internet services to larger agencies."
Re:Great Wall of China (Score:3, Informative)
Cheers
Re:DoS??? (Score:3, Informative)
Hopefully this will work out better (Score:5, Informative)
Netcraft [netcraft.com]
When the U.S. Justice Department stepped up its investigation of cybercrime, it found spam originating from an unexpected source: hundreds of powerful computers at the Department of Defense and the U.S. Senate. The machines were "zombies" that had been compromised by hackers and integrated into bot networks that can be remotely controlled to send spam or launch distributed denial of service attacks.
(this link also mentions the older Republican access of the Democrat fileserver)
Re:Great Wall of China (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The terrorists win again! (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, 911, the pretext for all this, was an inside job!
The next thing you would say is that Pearl Harbor was allowed deliberately to throw the bomb at 'em Japs or that Hilter was a puppet of the US and the entire WW-2 was pre-planned albeit apparently sketchily - you know the routine elite-versus-commoner struggles that lead to "war and strife"
These things sound like good gossip material but are not so much verifiable.
Re:DoS??? (Score:3, Informative)
Sort of. While there would be fewer targets, in theory the gateways would have very high levels of connectivity, resources, and knowhow behind them that might not exist with smaller agencies doing their own thing.
More importantly, think in terms of what the attacker is trying to do with a DoS and what the US government is attempting to do with the network. DoS attacks are frequently used as an extortion technique. This obviously won't work against the US government - even if the attack worked, there's no way the administration would lose face by paying to have it ended.
Another common use is to attempt to do damage to the target's ability to do work. In this case, the government branches would still be able to communicate with each other, both through the non-internet secure networks and because they could cluster behind their series of gateways. Information flow to the internet might be interupted but the crucial data could still get through. They would also have the ability to bring up alternative connections to the internet from the gateways in order to restore outgoing access to the internet. It's relatively easy to DoS a small company's ability to do work by attacking their internet connection. When you're dealing with something the magnitude of the federal government and the number of alternative networks available, it's very hard to do the same level of damage. Many critical things have to be designed to still work if the internet were to go offline for whatever reason.
Re:DoS??? (Score:3, Informative)