Chertoff hears panel's security concerns
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The Bush administration is trying to fund homeland security "on the cheap," cutting grants to local emergency workers and other programs, the chairman of a House committee said Friday.
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Chapter 13 of the 9/11 Commission Report is being cited almost every day in some part of Washington. Yesterday, Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) opened a Senate subcommittee hearing by reading
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DAVOS, Switzerland  - The United States is likely to keep a high threat designation for the airline industry because militants still see air travel as a target, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said.
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Members of a Senate panel today told Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker that they had doubts about the progress they had reported in testimony yesterday.
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Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Wednesday that Washington fears Europe may be a staging ground for terrorist attacks on the United States.
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Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Monday played down a report al Qaeda was planning a big attack on the United States, saying there was no credible information about an imminent threat.
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The United States remains safe after the attack at a Scottish airport and two foiled car bombs in London, and there is no plan to raise the terror alert level, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Monday.
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For months, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House oversight committee, has been threatening, subpoenaing and just plain badgering Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to come before his panel to answer questions about the run-up to the Iraq war, corruption and State Department contracting.
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(InfoWorld) - Fixing cybersecurity problems in the U.S. is a top priority at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said the agency's leader, but lawmakers didn't focus on the issue during a hearing in Congress Wednesday. Cybersecurity is a "very big issue" that DHS remains concerned about, said DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, testifying before the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee. Chertoff didn't go into details because much of the department's cybersecurity efforts are classified, he said. "I can assure you that we are working with other elements of the federal government and giving highest priority an enhanced strategy with respect to cybersecurity," he said. Cybersecurity threats have "enormous potential to do damage to the United States in years to come," Chertoff added. Chertoff testified before the committee in a hearing titled, "Holding the Department of Homeland Security Accountable for Security Gaps." But while cybersecurity problems continue inside and outside of the U.S. government, lawmakers focused on other issues during the hearing, including the hiring of border agents, training of bomb-sniffer dogs, and the scanning of airline cargo. Just this week, the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged a successful attack on an unclassified e-mail system earlier this year. While not focusing on cybersecurity, committee chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said DHS needs to improve in several areas. Thompson has criticized the department's cybersecurity efforts in the past, but cybersecurity issues were not on Thompson's list of top priorities for Chertoff in the remaining 16 months of U.S. President George Bush's administration. Instead, Thompson called on Chertoff to fill vacancies at DHS, to finish regulations for container security at ports, and to implement a biometric air passenger screening program. "We owe the American people security," Thompson said. "We owe them accountability. And most importantly, we owe them freedom from fear." Other than the short Chertoff statement on cybersecurity, the issue did not come up again in more than 90 minutes of questions from lawmakers. Representative Mike Rogers, an Alabama Republican, used part of his question time to complain to Chertoff that many bomb-sniffing dogs used by DHS came from overseas. Rogers urged Chertoff to find ways to breed bomb-sniffing and cadaver dogs in the U.S. "I'm concerned that we are increasingly relying on foreign imported dogs," he said.
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A senior security expert at the networking giant says that aspects of Microsoft's new operating system are worrying.
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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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A think tank has tapped several heavyweight cybersecurity experts for a commission tasked with giving security recommendations to the next U.S. president.
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The FBI wants to compile a massive computer database and analyze it for clues to unmask terrorist sleeper cells. Two congressmen are worried about whether the bureau will protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.
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A US Senate panel is set to discuss the nomination of Robert Gates as the country's new defence secretary.
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Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that the government learned its lessons from failed border-security initiatives and will move cautiously with its private-sector partner, Boeing Co., in the latest effort to use technology to curb illegal immigration.
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Robert Howard told a U.S. Senate committee last week that the VA is in the process of installing encryption software on all its laptops during confirmation hearings on his appointment to assistant secretary for information and technology of the agency.
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Republicans and Democrats on a Senate panel today debated the implications of a Pentagon report.