China Hackers Got Past Costly U.S. Computer Security With Ease
by Michael A Riley
June 5, 2015 8:35 PM EDT
The hackers who stole personal data on 4 million government employees from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management sneaked past a sophisticated counter-hacking system called Einstein 3, a highly-touted, multimillion-dollar and mostly secret technology thats been years in the making.
Its behind schedule, the result of inter-agency fights over privacy, control and other matters, and only about half of the government was protected when the hackers raided OPMs databases last December.
Its also, by the governments own admission, already obsolete.
Einstein 3 was state of the art two years ago, said James Lewis, senior fellow in cybersecurity at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Its good, but its not enough, and we know that because the commercial security industry is already moving away from that kind of defense.
The breach of OPM by hackers, linked by U.S. officials to the Chinese government, has focused attention on the shortcomings of Einstein 3, and by extension the troubled effort to secure government computer networks from sophisticated adversaries such as China and Russia.
more...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-06/china-hackers-got-past-costly-u-s-computer-security-with-ease
DCBob
(24,689 posts)quadrature
(2,049 posts)who benefits?
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Sooner or later we are going to have to deal with that.
nichomachus
(12,754 posts)Was put Hillary in charge of security. The email servers in her spare bedroom are impregnable. Impregnable, I tell you. No one has ever hacked into them.