on Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 10:19:47PM -0600, Jim Choate (ravage@ssz.com) wrote:

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/12/07/0223216.shtml

That's pretty poor reporting even for the combination of Choate & Slashdot. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011205/pl/indian_money_2.html Wednesday December 5 8:27 PM ET Judge Shuts Down Indian Trust System By ROBERT GEHRKE, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - A judge acted Wednesday to protect hundreds of millions of dollars in a government-run trust fund for American Indians that has been found to be at risk of security breaches. The emergency order came a day after a report detailed how easily a court-appointed investigator was able to hack into the accounting system at the Interior Department and manipulate financial data. The government computer system is essentially a bank that manages $500 million a year in royalties from land owned by 300,000 American Indians. But U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said that Interior's system had no firewalls to prevent intrusions, systems to detect hackers, or auditing methods to determine if account information had been manipulated. ``You don't expect a thief to leave a calling card?'' Lamberth asked Justice Department (news - web sites) attorney Matt Fader. Fader said Interior Secretary Gale Norton had already ordered all Internet access to the system terminated while firewalls are installed. Naturally, the private sector does far better. I couldn't think of a California pension management company that had similarly poor data security procedures. -- Karsten M. Self http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ Land of the free Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html