He finds agency's computer systems highly vulnerable
Posted on 02/27/2002 10:30:57 AM PST by ghostcat
Court-ordered hacker exposes BIA
He finds agency's computer systems highly vulnerable
By John Markoff
New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — Instructed by a federal judge to determine whether the computer network at the Bureau of Indian Affairs was secure from malicious intruders, Alan Balaran decided to infiltrate it.
He did this not once but three times and determined among other things that skilled hackers would be able to bilk Indian funds in trust at the bureau by having checks sent to themselves.
First Balaran went to a bureau building in Virginia, walked in through a loading platform and asked directions to the computing nerve center, where he plucked from a shredder a lengthy printout of data on some of the trust fund accounts that the agency manages for half a million Indians. Nobody stopped him.
Then he hired a team of hackers to break into the bureau's computers, using commonly available software.
Finally, after the bureau complained that the computer assault had been unfair because it relied on inside knowledge of the agency's network, Balaran's team broke in again, without such help, even setting up a trust fund account in his name.
Balaran is no computer rogue. He is a Washington lawyer appointed as a special master by the federal judge, Royce C. Lamberth, who, hearing the largest class-action suit ever filed by Indians, has already determined that for more than a century the government has mismanaged accounts held in trust for them. Judge Lamberth, who sits in Washington, will now determine whether the government should be held in contempt for failure to abide by past orders to repair its work.
Balaran, appointed by the judge in 2000 to oversee a variety of issues related to the suit, began looking into computer security at the bureau early last year. The effort intensified when a group of plaintiffs discovered, in the April 2001 issue of Government Executive magazine, an interview in which the agency's chief information officer, Dominic Nessi, confessed that its systems were vulnerable to hacking.
"For all practical purposes, we have no security," Nessi said in that interview.
Computer security experts say that although the problems at the bureau are particularly striking, they are not isolated. Many federal agencies are vulnerable, they say, despite years of public concern.
Balaran declined to comment publicly on his investigation, citing his continuing role in the court case. But the report on what he found, filed with the court in November, is a litany of security lapses stemming from what the report portrays as official neglect for over a decade.
A spokesman for the Interior Department, parent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, defended the bureau's computer security efforts, saying it had tried to deal with vulnerabilities long before the report. "I don't propose to defend all of the shortcomings," said the spokesman, John Wright. But "it's not like they didn't try to fix the problems. There were a number of attempts. We were led to believe" by consultants that the bureau's systems worked, "and they didn't work."
The Native people of this country have gotten screwed by the Fed since time began.
The moron should be fired for that single statement alone. The biggest part of security is anonymity. A statement like that will make you famous.
You have to know that the dumbocrats and the welfare leeches will not like this. And, there are those who claim that there exist "Indian Nations," protected by treaties with the U.S. Government, and that nothing less than a Contitutional Amendment can abbrogate those treaties (without mentioning most of those so-called "treaties" never received Senate confirmation).
I agree that the Indians have gotten a raw deal along the way, but they have marched down the path of government paternalism and into the socialist state willingly.
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