Last week, the U.S. Justice Department acknowledged that its Bureau of Justice Statistics website had been hacked. The hacker group Anonymous claimed credit for the hack and published 1.7 gigabytes of data. Included in the data were internal e-mails, which possibly contained personal or sensitive information related to crimes, criminals, and crime victims.
The Heritage Foundation’s new report listing the U.S. government cyber breaches and failures already has some new additions, including this hack and another that Paul Rosenzweig chronicled earlier today.
This ever-growing list of government cyber failures should be a warning to those who think that a top-down, government regulatory regime is the best way to protect our nation from attack. Regulating cybersecurity would impose potentially massive costs on the private sector while providing questionable improvements in security.
If this list is any indication, the government doesn’t have all the answers. A real cybersecurity solution would start with collaboration: clarifying legal ambiguities and encouraging the sharing of cyber threat and vulnerability information among the private and public sectors.
Hacking and cyber attacks are here to stay, and the U.S. should pursue sensible solutions.
Cyber security breaches have gone on for years. There will always be what seems to be a "good" reason to give up more of our freedoms, whether to govt or private business. It is never worth the price of freedom, nor worth the cost of our soldiers blood to have purchased and maintained our freedoms. As I recall, recently there was wind of a govt grab for more of our cyber personal freedoms. I, for one, vote, "No! Not on my watch!"
putting any system online is just plain stupid most of these systems can do without the extra easy access to make the job easier and for systems that need to be connected should use a different internet and operating system that is not available to the public
this government is so untrustworthy to note the term "smart" is not what it means…
anything deemed "smart" from this foreign American mindset is calling us "sucker."