Suit shuts down Indian Trust for security upgrade (was Re: Slashdot | U.S. Department of Interior Ordered Offline)

Karsten M. Self kmself at ix.netcom.com
Thu Dec 6 20:49:07 PST 2001


on Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 10:19:47PM -0600, Jim Choate (ravage at 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 <kmself at ix.netcom.com>       http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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