From Scout:
For some reason while reading this story in WaPo I was recalling the promise of the efficiency and effectiveness to be expected from Bush the MBA CEO President. Ahh those were the days.
In fiscal 2005, major federal agencies reported about 3,600 incidents that were serious enough to warrant alerting the government’s cybersecurity center at the Department of Homeland Security, including 304 instances of unauthorized access and 1,806 cases of malicious computer code, according to a yearly OMB report.
But that does not present a full picture. Despite requirements to do so, agencies are “not consistently reporting incidents of emerging cybersecurity threats,” government auditors said last year.
The grades that agencies receive on the congressional report card — compiled by the House Government Reform Committee — reflect their level of compliance with the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act, which outlines security procedures for agencies.
In 2005, in addition to Agriculture, the departments of Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, State and Veterans Affairs received F’s.</blockquote
Click Read more for the rest
From Scout:
SNIP
[Rep.] Davis said he worries about a kind of cyber Pearl Harbor, and the Pentagon noted in a statement that potential adversaries, realizing the United States’s overbearing military might, “see cyber attacks as an inexpensive means of leveling that battlefield.” It added, “These asymmetrical threats are real and the results of insecurity are potentially catastrophic.”
SNIP
Experts also said departments must close the wide gulf between senior leadership and information-security personnel.
Paul Kurtz, who worked in the White House on cybersecurity and now is the security-software industry’s trade group president, said that senior agency officials had the attitude that they “had much better things to do with my job” than work on information security.
The VA’s chief information-security officer, who announced his resignation June 29, said he had been unable to implement security changes during his more than three years on the job. He told Government Executive magazine that he had met VA Secretary Jim Nicholson only once, at a social event.
“The department has no interest in doing the right thing,” Pedro Cadenas Jr. told the magazine. “I am having personal difficulty looking veterans in the eye and telling them that things will be OK.”(Emphasis mine)
I was also thinking of Dick-vote right or you’ll all die-Cheney