DHS 'Dry Run' Support Cited
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In the weeks before key government tests of new radiation detection equipment, officials at the Department of Homeland Security helped contractors through repeated dry runs that enabled them to perform better during the examinations, according to government briefing documents obtained by The...
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WASHINGTON - A cybersecurity advocacy group on Tuesday called on U.S. President George Bush to focus more resources on computer issues and elevate the top IT security position at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to the assistant secretary level.
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We advise skepticism The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ditching a controversial data-mining program, the Associated Press revealed today.â¦
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The Bush administration's new federal disaster-response plan drew harsh criticism yesterday from state and local officials only a day after it was unveiled, prompting fresh calls by House Democrats to make the Federal Emergency Management Agency a stand-alone Cabinet-level agency.
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Representatives of the CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) project, which launched in December 2005, reported to Black Hat DC attendees that progress continues on the project. The DHS-sponsored effort is currently sifting through "mountains" of vuln data, and they're in touch with the affected companies.
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Invasive DHS system just like the one we're building, apparently EU officials are crying foul over Department of Homeland Security attempts to impose draconian and invasive data requirements on passengers travelling to the US. The US demands, however, are remarkably similar to the ones the EU itself proposes to make of passengers travelling to Europe, making the officials shouting "blackmail" and "troublesome" somewhat unlikely guardians of the citizenry's freedoms.â¦
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Several readers have asked us to check this surprising statistic, often used by Edwards. The language may be overly dramatic, but the figure is an official one, from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The department believes that one-third of the adult homeless population of the United States "have...
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Poor information-sharing both inside and outside government is threatening homeland security, congressional investigators said Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will hold a hearing on Capitol Hill on June 20 to discuss the findings of an investigation into the agency's own problems in battling electronic attacks and IT systems intrusions. In a hearing labeled "Hacking the Homeland: Investigating Cyber-security Vulnerabilities at the Department of Homeland Security," officials including DHS chief information officer Scott Charbo and Gregory Wilshusen, director of information security issues at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) are scheduled to detail their findings in response to requests from Congress to test the agency's IT security defenses. In a letter sent to Charbo on April 30, members of Congress led by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, asked DHS to conduct a review of its information system security in the wake of news that the departments of commerce and state were successfully hacked during 2006. Details of those systems intrusions were first revealed at a hearing coordinated by the House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cyber-security, Science, and Technology on April 19. "These incidents jeopardize the integrity of our government's information. We are concerned that similar incidents may be occurring within the networks of the Department of Homeland Security," read the letter, which was also signed by ranking members of the House Subcommittee on Management, Investigations, and Oversight. Among the issues expected to be addressed by Charbo and other witnesses -- including Keith A. Rhodes, director for the Center for Technology and Engineering in the GAO -- at next week's hearing will be a review of cybersecurity incidents reported to the DHS Security Operations Center (SOC), such as instances of rootkits, classified leaks, compromised Web sites, bot infections, unauthorized use of networks by contractors, and virus attacks. According to a Congressional press release distributed ahead of the hearing, the GAO witnesses will also describe an investigation they conducted on a specific DHS network that is "riddled with significant information security control weaknesses that place sensitive and personally identifiable information at increased risk of unauthorized disclosure." The subcommittee also plans to air some of its concerns with the DHS OneNet project, which is aimed at consolidating all of the agency's information networks under one roof, and to question a perceived lack of IT security funding by Charbo. The Congressional committee has said it will call for further investigation of security issues existing within DHS at the hearing. Among the specific questions posed to DHS leaders by Thompson and other members of the House Committee on Homeland Security are what responsibility Charbo has over management of the agency's networks, and his relationship with the department's chief information security officers (CISOs) and chief information officers. Charbo was also asked to provide details of the agency's information security policies and incident response plans, along with data on how many and what types of security events it has reported to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which was established in 2003 and operates as a partnership between DHS and the public and private sectors. Among the incidents that Congress has specifically asked for more information about are the most severe threats encountered by the agency between 2004 and 2007. The committee has also asked DHS officials to reveal whether or not they have taken an inventory of each access point on the agency's network, and how it has approached the practice of penetration testing for its internal and external systems. In addition to questioning the department's security testing policies, the committee has asked DHS to turn over details of any secure software coding initiatives it has launched in the name of eliminating vulnerabilities in its applications, as well as statistics on how much of its coding is being performed by outside contractors. The committee has also asked for information on whether or not DHS is requiring two-factor IT systems authentication for all privileged personnel and systems administrators. A good deal of discussion at the hearing is likely to be given over to the process that DHS has employed to meet the terms of the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), which was enacted by Congress in 2002 and is aimed at improving IT security in the federal space via a system of mandated annual audits. The hearing may be seen as a bellwether moment in the continued development of government IT security policies and enforcement, as the DHS has been charged with helping to oversee the performance of other agencies, including via its work with US-CERT. If the DHS is found to have failed to protect its own systems adequately, some observers believe that the agency will be put under significant pressure to completely retrench its IT operations in the name of improving security, a process that may then be pushed out to other federal agencies. Some experts believe that adopting such an approach will soon become a fact of life for all government agencies, as many legacy computer systems and policies are not suited to respond to today's fierce security climate. Dave Nelson, a retired deputy CIO for IT security at NASA, who also worked in the White House Office of Scientific Research, said that the government, much like enterprise businesses, has been put in the uncomfortable position of coping with security threats in a cat-and-mouse game, based on long-standing flaws in the technologies and processes it employs. "Until the Internet and the computers that are on it are fundamentally reengineered to be inherently secure, we will always be in coping mode," Nelson said. "The government and IT industry may not know how to make these types of technologies yet, but if they don't get cracking, things will only get worse; as the economic and political payoff of attacks continues to rise, that's our only choice." While Nelson said he has not been made privy to information on attacks on government IT infrastructure for several years, he estimates that there are still many breaches, and that the sophistication of the attacks is ramping up quickly. One of the specific areas that Nelson said needs to be investigated more closely is to what extent foreign governments or politically motivated groups such as terrorists may be involved in cyberthreats. "We don't have any public information that would conclusively prove that some of these attacks are being launched by other nations, but there seem to be significant resources behind them in terms of people and financing," Nelson said. "That's the scariest part, and extrapolating that idea into the future, I don't see a lot of encouraging signs for improvement. If you look at the zero day attacks, they only seem to be getting worse, and I don't see evidence that the systems vulnerabilities they target are going away anytime soon."
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Amid increasing concerns about possible terrorist attacks leading up to the presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin Monday to the 50 states and the District of Columbia, ...
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The Homeland Security Department is reviewing whether managers with ties to Oak Ridge National Laboratory improperly influenced the decision to give $20 million to the laboratory since 2004 to help develop a list of the nation's top potential terrorist targets, according to DHS officials.
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An inspector general's report charges that top U.S. housing official Alphonso Jackson urged staff members to favor friends of President Bush when awarding Department of Housing and Urban Development contracts. But investigators so far have found no direct proof that Jackson's staff obeyed.
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J   an Egeland , the U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs and the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, had a dual purpose for his visit to Washington this week. He told U.S. officials that American relief and food assistance has saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the Darfur region of Sudan and in Congo. But he also said there was a global trend of declining support for humanitarian efforts around the world.
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Resources essential to tackle the humanitarian crisis in Sudan&#39;s remote western Darfur region will run dry unless international funding doubles, British-based charities say.
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Government Computer News is reporting that a 15-page Inspector General's report on time wasted by workers at the U.S. Department of the Interior has raised such a stir that the Dept.'s own servers have seen major slowdowns due to excessive downloads of the report.
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A dispute has broken out between the Department of Homeland Security and unions representing Border Patrol workers and immigration officers after the publication of a survey that found that most employees believe they have not been given sufficient resources, training and support to fight terrorism.
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The United States gave UN Secretary General Kofi Annan a belated show of support but said the United Nations remains under a cloud over allegations of corruption in Iraq.