Hellooo, NSA? The US State Department can't kick hackers out of its networks – report An attack against US State Department servers is still ongoing three months after the agency spotted miscreants inside its email system, it's reported. In November the State Department was forced to suspend its unclassified email systems after it was successfully infiltrated by hackers unknown. At the time the agency said its …
It doesn’t seem as though the American taxpayer is getting value for money.
I guess the NSA, et al, have misplaced their charters... Pretty freaking sad that this is still ongoing and they are too busy grabbing what they can instead of dealing with the threats and attacks. Having info is great if you actually using it to "protect" the population and government but I'm not sure what they're really doing.
Never heard of them. The ones that are supposed to be supplying "Security" to the U.S.of.A. No Such Agency when you need them...
Now the National Spying Agency. They're right down the road - BW parkway, hang a louie and wave at the $9.15/hour chap guarding the jewels.
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is a bunch of clueless talking heads that can't even negotiate themselves out of a wet paper bag.
Do you honestly think that they can manage their computer network properly?
Our "Fearless Leader" even wants to start another bureaucracy to protect us all from computer hackers. Maybe they can fix the network.
The NSA has different duties, and they are NOT chartered with anything within the continental USA borders. That's the FBI's and GCHQ's responsibility.
" I though GCHQ had nothing official to do with the US"
Keep up at the back there.
It's illegal for NSA to spy in the US but legal (in US law) for them to spy in the UK & it's illegal for GCHQ to spy in the UK but legal (in UK law) for them to spy in the US. So each contracts out their spying on their own populace to the other. Everyone's happy except for the plebs and they don't count.
Wrong. The NSA has not only a Signals Intelligence mission but also an Information Assurance mission. This most definitely operates within the borders of the United States.
http://m.nsa.gov/ia/index.shtml
Interestingly, this part of their mission includes, by Executive Order 12333 (amended by EO 13470) "to maintain or strengthen privacy and civil liberties protections".
http://m.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml
Are any of Obama's Executive agencies doing their jobs?
The FBI, NSA, CIA spying on private citizens without warrants, Justice Dept trying to grab data stored overseas, State can't keep malware off their computers - all of these are part of the Executive Branch, all headed by Fearless Leader Barry. Anyone else see a pattern here?
BTW, as of 2009, U.S. Federal computer system maintenance was outsourced to a former classmate of Michelle Obama's. So was the disastrous healthcare website.
Messages regarding US policy on the Ukraine, and other files, have been swiped from the system, two sources report.
There is a policy different from getting the current retardation of Ukrainians killed and ignoring Nazis in order to get Chevron some fracking rights and cause grief for Putin in order to realize the liberal/neocon pussy-wetting dream of "regime change" in Russia? I think we should be told.
500? you seriouslly think its that few?
My little 2-bit small business servers deal with thousands of attacks each and every day. I'm pretty sure the US State Department has a much higher volume of actual attacks. They're either ignoring a huge amount in that count, or have a screen door protecting the network.
How about the "Overcompensated Contractor Rate" at say $200K a-1 (that's per annum). That would be (500,000,000,000/200,000)/(2015-2001) = 5,000,000/2/14 ~= 178,571 OCRa-1 or 1.78KOCRa-1.
Now unfortunately I think I might have accidentally devised a metric measure there, so this will need converting via LSD which for our younger readers and non Brits is actually Pounds (Libres or £), Shillings (Sestertii), Pence (Denarii) our old currency in the UofK and not a psychoactive drug. Any similarities with ancient Roman currency is funky, and my spelling will probably wake a pedant or two. Now: £1 = 20s, 1s = 12d. Oh, did I mention the Guinea at £1 1s? There were lots of other weirdness as well.
This all means that 500GUSD is roughly 20TJubs 12GWales and a slack handful of change for a taxi.
Thats enough for... 1.5 TRILLION chicken nuggets! (if you buy the 20 piece boxes and don't get a Coke).
Now, I suggest we get the FBI to look into this mess, which we could bribe at a rate of say 117,000 nuggets per employee, per day? OK, true, nearly all of them would die pretty soon... eating at a steady rate of 4875 nuggets per hour, this would kill the average employee in 90 seconds from salt poisoning (that is if they could keep scoffing the 1.3 nuggets per second required to do so)... but.. but... Such a waste...
$500 Bn/annum = ~ 1.3440 chicken nuggets per FBI employee per second.
Or, to put it in a different perspective, it's about 27 lunar landings using Saturn V:
thespacereview.com:
As reported above, the Apollo program costs $20.4 billion if we simply added yearly spending of its 15 year-lifespan (1959–1973), or $109 billion in today’s money. Since 11 Apollo piloted missions were flown, that amounts to $9.9 billion per flight. That’s way over Mercury and Gemini mission costs, reflecting the complexity of going to the Moon. And if we consider these $109 billion resulted in six lunar landings, each of these missions costs some $18 billion
And then there's the disclosure of the Mosul battle plan. Now that's transparent.
Now that is a brilliant idea... I'm still trying to figure out what genius decided to disclose it and why. Then again, maybe it's clever* ruse to make the ISIS (or whatever they call themselves this week) think there's plans for a major battle and leave town before the troops get there.
Stupid, stupid, stupid......
* for some value of "clever"
They are reinfected several times a second. They can't find the source because every device, server and user is the source. Even if they shut down the whole thing, wiped every device, every bit of data in the system, and reloaded their software from known good copies, it would still be hacked before the first useful work was done. There's probably backup hacks lodged in every printer, network switch and server firmware by now - just in case they decide to air gap the entire network. And if they wipe every piece, the replacements new from the factory will come with exploits preinstalled and the first one will propagate through the network contaminating everything again within seconds of being switched on. It is hopeless.
Sony has the same problem. Actually, everybody who uses Windows does.
And if they wipe every piece, the replacements new from the factory will come with exploits preinstalled and the first one will propagate through the network contaminating everything again within seconds of being switched on. It is hopeless.
Sony has the same problem. Actually, everybody who uses Windows does.
I couldn't agree more!!!!
Oh, but then we could ALL use that to keep them locked out!
The U.S. military has a fundamental choice here: DEFEND its headquarters and the civilians who happen to live in the neighborhood, or allow it to be slowly destroyed while they try for some half-ass Doolittle Raid style strike against ONE of our many enemies to "degrade the morale of the enemy".
It's the same choice they've had for 75 years.
Guess which way they've gone almost every time?
The best defense is NOT a good offense. It is a good defense -- or any defense at all. Make U.S. CERT an independent entity and give THEM the $500B and see what they can do with it. The "A Team" has clearly failed.
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