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Stuff The Military-Industrial Complex Should Use
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-10-15
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An embarrassing breach of Department of Homeland Security computers from a Chinese site has at least one Congressman fuming, and the rest of us wondering what $1.7 billion buys in security these days.
 | | Stuff The Military-Industrial Complex Should Use |  |
The breach in question allowed an unauthorized external attacker to reach out and touch about 150 computers within what DHS thought was a protected network. Criticism of security provider Unisys, a major government contractor, quickly followed.
It has been claimed that a lack of effective installation and monitoring of intrusion protection systems contributed to the breach; Unisys has denied all blame in the situation.
After seeing the early reports, we couldn't help but wonder where that money could have been spent more wisely. Chad Perrin at TechRepublic has a list of technologies like Nagios and Snort that we think could have helped, provided they were installed and monitored.
Oh, both of those are open source technologies, too. Drop them on a properly configured white box machine running SELinux or OpenBSD, hire some hardcore security geeks to watch for problems, and it seems like our federal government could have accomplished more with far less than $1.7 billion.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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