GAO Criticizes Homeland Security's Efforts to Fulfill Its Mission
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Hobbled by inadequate funding, unclear priorities, continuing reorganizations and the absence of an overarching strategy, the Department of Homeland Security is failing to achieve its mission of preventing and responding to terrorist attacks or natural disasters, according to a comprehensive report...
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House members want answers from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to a number of questions, from how his department manages multibillion-dollar contracts to how it assesses risk and divvies up scarce funds.
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Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Tuesday that the government should reconsider how it warns people about security threats, conceding that its color-coded scale has invited "questions and even occasional derision."
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By Carol Eisenberg, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.  Jun. 13--WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff   yesterday urged operators of water and waste treatment plants to secure chemicals such as chlorine from terrorists, although they're not required to do so.
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WASHINGTON - President Bush focused on the task of protecting the country, signing legislation Monday to fund the Department of Homeland Security and heralding his battle plan for fighting terrorists as better than rival Sen. John Kerry's...
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According to a new U.S. Department of  Homeland Security report, inadequate financing and training  have left many department officers in Saudi Arabia ill-prepared  to enforce a program intended to stop Saudi Arabia terror  suspects from receiving U.S. visas, the New York Times reported  on Friday.
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Congress has balked at consolidating committee jurisdictions when it comes to overseeing the $39 billion Department of Homeland Security and its constituent agencies, a key recommendation of the panel.
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Government lawyers have hampered investigations into suspected waste and fraud at the Department of Homeland Security, officials told a House subcommittee yesterday.
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The agency has come under criticism for its disaster relief program as well as its operating, lending and contracting practices.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS)Â CIO was on the hot seat Wednesday on Capitol Hill after an independent audit found that a database that screens U.S. visitors lacked security controls. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee called on DHS CIO Scott Charbo to explain why he should keep his job after persistent cybersecurity problems at the agency. "What happened to leadership?" Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee chairman and a Mississippi Democrat, said during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science, and Technology. "What happened to accountability?" Lawmakers also said they were concerned that the agency reported 844 cybersecurity incidents in 2005 and 2006. "Although we still have a ways to go, we've made measurable improvements in the management of information security at the department," Charbo said. "Certainly, we need to increase our vigilance to ensure that such incidents do not happen again." Many of the 844 incidents were minor, and the agency has taken major steps to fix past cybersecurity issues, Charbo said. Many of the reported cybersecurity incidents related to problems like lost laptops that did not result in data breaches, he added. The subcommittee did not have a breakdown of the incidents Wednesday. Asked about reports of bots installed on DHS computers that could send information out to hackers, Charbo said he had "no evidence" that the bots caused a breach. Thompson's comments came as the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report saying DHS continues to have "significant weaknesses in computer security controls that threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of key ... systems." GAO investigators found no security controls on the US-VISIT database, the system that screens people who want to visit the U.S. for potential terrorists and criminals. Lawmakers are concerned whether terrorists could get into the database "and change or alter their names to allow them access to this country, and we wouldn't even know that they're doing it," said Representative Bob Etheridge, a North Carolina Democrat. A contractor provides IT security for US-VISIT, but DHS has its own security controls in place to protect the database, Charbo said. He didn't disclose specific security measures. The GAO doesn't have evidence that the US-VISIT database was breached, said Keith Rhodes, chief technologist and director of the GAO's Center for Technology and Engineering. "I did not see controls in place that would prevent it," Rhodes said. "I did not see defensive perimeters, and I did not see detection systems in place whether it had or had not [been breached]." GAO started a cybersecurity review of DHS a year ago but curtailed its efforts because it kept finding "more and more" problems, Rhodes said. "If we had continued to this day, I would argue we'd still be finding things," he said. "The problems were pervasive. The problems were systemic." Charbo outlined recent measures DHS has taken to improve cybersecurity there. The agency is collapsing multiple legacy WANs into a single WAN, and it is standardizing all e-mail and directory services onto a single platform, he said. The agency had 13 separate e-mail systems when it was formed out of 22 U.S. agencies in 2002, he said. DHS also is combining multiple data centers into a shared center, he said. Thompson asked how DHS officials can preach cybersecurity practices to other agencies and private companies while continuing to have its own problems. Among the incidents DHS reported were employees sending out classified documents on unclassified networks and contractors attaching unauthorized laptops to the DHS network, he said. "How can the Department of Homeland Security be a real advocate of sound cybersecurity practices without following some of its own advice?" he said. "What the department is doing on its own network speaks so loud that the message isn't getting across to anyone else."
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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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The Department of Homeland Security remains hampered by personality conflicts, bureaucratic bottlenecks and an atmosphere of demoralization, according to officials and independent experts.
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The Bush administration is facing growing criticism that it has failed to move aggressively enough in the war of ideas against al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups over the three years since the 9/11 attacks.
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Homeland Security officials unveiled new steps yesterday to ensure that federal buildings are not left unprotected, after two cases in which contract security guards stayed away from their jobs because they had not been paid.
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The Bush administration isn't satisfied with the quality of information it's getting about terrorist groups operating in Pakistan's volatile tribal area, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.
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The Department of Homeland Security violated a congressional funding ban when it continued to develop a computerized program that creates risk assessments of travelers entering and leaving the United States, according to lawmakers and privacy advocates.
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Eye of Sauron poked after dodgy debrief Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials have been lambasted by Congressmen after apparently attempting to conceal technical problems and programme slippages.â¦