Cyber Security

12 posts

Even The Very Best Are Vulnerable

Came across this notification from Network Solutions this morning pointing to the fact that even the very best ecommerce providers in the industry are vulnerable to criminal activities compromising Network Solutions ecommerce hosting customers. I respect their forensic and remediation efforts, but its time to rethink the paradigm and reinvent ecommerce.

How does an industry sort through fault and remedy the consumers that will eventually be hurt by overall process design that exposes private credit card and personal information? Every day another consumer’s credit is ruined and identity compromised. The source of this type of consumer injury can be months away from the actual impact and never actually be revealed.

I happened to accidently come across this notification from Network Solutions, a company I’ve used for years. I did not receive any proactive notification from them. However, I certainly didn’t miss my daily marketing email from them.

Cyber Security?

Have you read the latest news about “Cyber Security”

Homeland Security Dept. Seeking Computer Hackers To Help Secure Federal Systems

Secret White House Helicopter Data Found On A Computer In Iran?

Chinese, Russian hackers ‘probing US power grid

So now we are going to hire “hackers” who by definition are criminal by nature to help “Secure Federal Systems”  I can hardly believe this is real.

A quick look at the “hacker jobs” listed at the General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems Information Technology “Functional Area” referenced in the article, tells a potential enemy most of everything they would need to know to begin mounting an assault on government systems.

Who in their right mind would publish top secret detailed job descriptions like this to the Internet?

Do you know that our government uses the SUN Identity Management Suite specifically Sun Identity Manager and Sun Access Manager to manage security to government systems? A mediocre Chinese computer scientist could easily have obtained the information to piece together the architecture of a “secure” systems deployment.

If that’s not bad enough, the Chinese computer scientist can just as easily route TCP/IP packets to our government networks for the purposes of probing and discovery, because we both utilize TCP/IP.

But, our government networks are protected by sophisticated firewalls, content filtering and intrusion protection, all designed and coded by computer engineers from China, India and other countries around the world.

When it comes to Government Information Technology and so called “Cyber Security”, we are suffering from a serious case of extreme stupidity.

This entire Internet paradigm needs to go, before we loose both our infrastructure as in water, electricity and communications as well as our military competitive edge. We are wide open here.

We need to get government data and communications off of the Internet, now!