Stony Stevenson writes "Unisys, a major government IT contractor, is reportedly being investigated for failing to detect cyber-attacks, and then covering up its failings. Two US congressmen have called for an investigation into cyber-attacks aimed at the Department of Homeland Security, along with a contractor (that would be Unisys) charged with securing those networks. 'The House Committee on Homeland Security's investigations led them to believe the department is under attack by foreign powers, and could be at risk because of "incompetent and possibly illegal activity" by a US contractor. The congressmen didn't name the contractor in the letter. However, the Washington Post on Monday reported that the FBI is investigating Unisys, a major information technology firm with a $1.7 billion Department of Homeland Security contract, for allegedly failing to detect cyber break-ins traced to a Chinese-language Web site and then trying to cover up its deficiencies.'" Unisys denies it all.
Dr. Evil: Here's the plan. We get the warhead, and we hold the Department of Homeland Security ransomed for.....One MILLION DOLLARS!!
No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Unisys alone makes over one million dollars a year!
Dr. Evil: Really?
No.2: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Evil: That's a number. Okay then. We hold the Department of Homeland Security ransom for.....One Point Seven BILLION DOLLARS!!
No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Unisys alone makes over one million dollars a year!
Have you seen Unisys' quarterly reports recently? I'm not quite sure that's the case.
(joking. They still make a ton of money. Just not as much as they need to support themselves.)
This is incompetence on both ends, really. Security is not something that only the contractor has to worry about, its something the users also have to worry about. The government should freaking train their employees and get them to pass classes of security, especially in the DHS. If you don't pass, your pay gets docked or whatever. The NIST has some damn good guidelines for securing XP boxen, so I don't understand why they don't implement those policies (they are free, right???) and train their personnel to use them.
Yes, Unisys may have screwed up, but then again, its all about the better mousetrap and all...
Don't know about DHS, but DoD requires this annually. Don't finish it, bad things happen. It's not the greatest training, but it's 'okay' and repeating it annually drives it home. The problem is that many of the breaches are not in fact the fault of (or involving) end-users. Rather, they can be traced back to poor perimeter security, lack of patching, etc...all responsibility of admin types.
Security first and foremost is not a product you buy. Security is a process or procedure you develop and stick to, review constantly and readjust to match the requirements of an ever changing "market" of threats. And as long as neither companies nor governments realize that (let's not even get to the users, they can only stick to the policy created, even if they knew better), no security will be seen. Security is actually the quest for the better mousetrap. The problem is, as soon as you have it, you get to
What does this have to do with the article? The issue isn't a lack of security really that's at issue. a) Managed Security Services never find really bad stuff except by accident b)The Chinese are in and out of our entire government largely at-will (it always takes them months or longer to detect the intrusions and exfiltration c) MSSP's -always- have clients that dispute their installation process and billing. Given these, UNISYS really is no worse off than anyone else in the industry and the conversation
Unisys is probably not worse than the rest, but, honestly, is that the way it should be? "I'm not worse than the rest, so why try harder?" What I blame is the way contracts are. A contract specifies what is to be done, and a company will do that, to the point, and not an inch more. There is some regulation, written more than a year ago (in security terms, somewhere in antediluvian times), and that regulation is upheld. Why or for what, nobody cares.
And unless that attitude towards security, or any procedure,
Right. But all of that is essentially old news and oft covered here. In fact, it's such conventional wisdom that long after it IS fixed, youll still hear people saying it on Slashdot. The NEW information - which is what makes this more than yet-another-article-about-the-same-old-crap is the alleged -intentional- deception and that they're being criminally investigated for it (vs dealing with it withing the scope of contractual control)
Some security rules or procedures are drafted and never reviewed.
Anyone that has worked inside government IT whether directly or as a contractor will know that this is government politics at play. There are exceptions, but most highly skilled and trained system administrators are going where the money is, and it's not working as a gov't employee. I know. A gov't IT department may have policies and procedures up the wazoo, but at the same time no budget or authority to ensure compliance. Exception is the rule in gov't. Here's an example: "Sir, there appears to be atta
I guess if nobody reads the article, they figure it's not that important where they (don't) start reading from? Or else Stony Stevenson likes to read articles from back to front? I wonder how many/. readers will even notice.
Hey don't shoot the messenger. The linking to the Washington Post was a mod job. I had originally linked to a different site which referenced the Washington Post in its article, but which overall was more a summary of the whole affair.
Can people please stop abusing the term "cyber". I mean, it once had a useful meaning (electronic control of physical processes) that is now on the verge of being lost.
This is about government and contractors. Free market is next door. Actually, it's down the corridor, then right, then... ask again, I forgot where it was, we hardly use it today anymore.
Among my various other gigs, I've often worked as a contractor doing certification and accreditation (C&A) paperwork for half a dozen fed. govt. agencies. "C&A" is the required paperwork that is supposed to certify that an agency's systems have been secured in accordance with applicable NIST, DoD, etc. standards. Understand that many, if not most, agencies devote far more time, money, and effort to making the paperwork look good than they do to actually securing the systems. Some agencies, and some of their contractors, think the NIST SP 800-37 C&A process, DIACAP, FISMA reporting, etc. is just a worthless paper shuffle. Some are even still using SP 800-26 risk assessment questionnaires in lieu of a full C&A. I can't tell you how many job interviews I've gone on where the contractor company's hiring manager would actually brag about how they are going to falsify the C&A and snow the agency's inspector general, OMB, or whomever. My standard response to that has been, "Can I visit you in prison?" (Usually this spells the end of that particular interview process.) Since, up to now, nobody has actually gone to federal prison for submitting bogus C&A documentation, some people thought they could get away with this kind of bogosity forever. A strange and unlikely confluence of events caused the Unisys situation: they (allegedly) cheated on the C&A process, AND the intruders pwned the DHS network, including the main admin password. The successful intrusions caused an audit which exposed the C&A fraud (which otherwise would have slid on by). Too bad, so sad.
I'd say the same thing applies in many regulated industries where it is required to document that a computer system meets various quality standards.
Far more money gets spent on documenting that the system works correctly than actually making the system work correctly. Often you end up with a system that looks great on paper that has lots of bugs in actual operation. Lots of tests get written that look like they test something but which rarely uncover bugs. The whole exercise costs a fortune, and largely exists to satisfy auditors (whether internal or external to the company performing the exercise).
Techniques like agile programming, automated testing, code reviews, etc are shunned because they're non-traditional and don't generate lots of paper. There is a fear that in an audit a government representative who hasn't signed on to the methodology might hammer you to death over not having a 2000 page design specification and a load of tests written and executed by everybody from the programmers, to IT QA, to end users (often the same exact test gets reformatted and run by all parties just so that it can be said that everybody had a hand in testing).
I once had to evaluate whether it was safe to directly modify a particular database field in an application, and was relieved to see that this application had one of those aforementioned thick design specifications. Then I was dismayed to find out that the only documentation there was on the field was the fact that it existed, what table it was in, what it was called, what kind of field it was, and what it contained (WidgetCorrectionFactor = Factor used to Correct the Widget value - really helpful as if I couldn't have guessed that much from the field name!). Absent was any kind of documentation as to what code might reference that field or what tables might join to it. I could search the source for the field name, but then there wasn't any kind of documentation or flow charts indicating the typical system workflow or in what order the various routines might get called. It was like documenting all the cell types in an animal without bothering to indicate what the actual animal looked like and how everything went together. But the auditors loved the document.
The issue is that most often QA and management and external auditors have no way of knowing whether a piece of code actually works or not. So, instead they look for stuff they can understand - paperwork. The paperwork does tend to lead to some basic form of quality, but rarely does it lead to code that doesn't break down on all the various one-off-cases that don't make their way into human-executed tests. I'll take a simple automated test that can be executed against a matrix of input values against a complex human-executed test that only ever gets run once (and is likely not repeated every time a piece of seemingly-unrelated code is touched) any day!
"Security Unleashed - At Unisys, we're looking at security in an entirely new way.
Security is no longer a defensive measure. It's an enabling catalyst for achievement.
Unisys Secure Business Operations help to unleash your full potential." taken from Unisys web
it says they can make everything possibility with their motto "we help you adapt quickly to meet ever-changing market demands and be resilient, agile and open" is a trash after all and hoping for a big fish to come after.. but the quote that they h
Actually, this webpage speaks the truth, and I do believe them. Security is for them appearantly not defending you against threats but rather covering you in enough buzzwords that you don't notice that nothing is being done.
This isn't needed with Unisys! Unisys' kind of security is (quote from the reply above) "an enabling catalyst for achievement. Unisys Secure Business Operations help to unleash your full potential."
Appearantly they mean whoever wants to hack their customers and not their customers with that statement, but you can't say that they're lying.
11-13-91 Scores of newspapers and commentators denounce a Doonesbury series about Dan Quayle's DEA file and Brett Kimberlin, a federal prisoner put in solitary confinement to keep him from repeating his claim that he sold marijuana to the vice president. "Who cares what a comic strip may or may not say about me or anyone else," said Quayle. Trudeau is denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate, as numerous papers withhold the series and some drop the strip. -- Doonesbury timeline, 1990 [doonesbury.com]
What I want to know is what the hell could cost 1.7 billion dollars? Are they putting HA systems with redundant fiber channel SANs on every desktop? How big is the DHS? If were talking even 100,000 people that's over $17,000 per person in IT costs. For that kind of money they should have had big time segmentation with all kinds of traffic monitoring and IDSes along with honeypots and tarpits. Hell, for that kinda money I would even include fart detectors.
I highly doubt that. As with most government contracts you have to have a clearance to actually work on it, something not easily obtained by a lot of U.S. Citizens much less someone from a country that we really don't trust all that much. So I'm fairly certain that most of the people involved with the program are U.S. Citizens born and bred or at least naturalized from another trusted nation i.e. Great Britain, Canada, Australia.
And that means what, exactly? That they adhere to some law which was passed with the intention to generate security and is circumvented with the intention to generate revenue.
Unisys are just another tech dinosaur that never made it out of the seventies.
FWIW, Unisys didn't exist in the seventies. I was there. I worked on both types of kit (in those days you either went with the herd and learned to use IBM, or you learned to be versatile).
IIRC it came about via the merging of Burroughs and Sperry/UNIVAC in about 1986 (in fact, to be specific, I think Burroughs swallowed Sperry).
As with most government contracts you have to have a clearance to actually work on it, something not easily obtained by a lot of U.S. Citizens...
This is a big part of the problem. The vast majority of Government Contractors are only marginally qualified and got their jobs by having the clearance, not by being technically proficient. This is known as "warm bodies" syndrome since many contracts pay per position filled. Getting a clearance can take years, depending on the level, and usually takes months, so this is a high barrier to entry and keeps a lot of smart people out.
There are many very capable and well-qualified people in Government Contracting, but they are a minority. Of course, Management, being what it is, doesn't want to give bad news to a customer, so sometimes they "muddy the waters".
You'll notice that I didn't make any mention of the qualifications of those people. I agree with you very through and through. I was just stating that the people involved in that contract were most likely not offshore.
Let's just say I have insight into the subject and it would be extremely difficult to do. Heavy auditing, random inspections, random pen testing, and many many myriad things would get in the way of that. Also most networks in govt. are totally segregated (reference air-gap) from the rest of the world, so with anything actually sensitive it would be completely impossible. I know that you're going to scoff at that statement, but trust me when I say that the cost of offshoring anything like that would be extremely expensive not to mention illegal and when dealing with govt. contracts you play by their rules. They are very lucrative contracts and one violation can lose the entire thing, so it really isn't in a company's best interest to even try it with govt. contracts the risk vs. reward is much to great.
That's bogus generalization. I've worked for several contractors including Unisys and I can tell you that while it is true that obtaining a clearance is a hurdle, the increase in pay you get with a clearance makes it worth the effort. Also, how do you think people get a clearance to begin with? Someone like Unisys sponsors them. Of course, if you're already cleared you're a more attractive candidate, but it is totally false to say that contractors only hire people on the basis of their clearance rather than
Actually, Unisys hires through temp agencies and the temps only have to pass an FBI background check. I know this, because I worked for IBM in a government data center at the time. We handled the big iron (oddly enough, including some machines from Sun and some ancient AS/400s) and the Unisys flunkies did operations and tape library stuff (cartridge and reel to reel). DOT, IRS, etc stuff. Believe it or not, they had PCs in there running Win95 and NT4 with no egress filtering to the internet... There were qui
Actually, Unisys hires through temp agencies and the temps only have to pass an FBI background check.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I'm a former full-time employee of Unisys, and used to do pre-sales architecture and systems engineering for them. On one particular contract we worked on, there were a couple of us full-timers to do architecture, another to handle the PM angle, several short-timers to do write code and DBA work, and a couple of outsourced coders.
More to the point, when companies lose contracts they lose to them to a small circle of competitors and those competitors rehire most of the people who were on the contract. In fact that is so common you usually take your tenure / seniority with you to the next company. When a contract changes hands, it really means the management layer and the interface between management and the government is being changed. Workers by and large keep their jobs.
No, you're wrong. And these days, Unisys' business is far more service oriented, rather than providing 1970's dinosaur technology. And the services are in line with (competitive with) the services other contractors provide.
Out-of-country non-nationals are not about to be supporting contracts to DoD or DHS that require security clearances.
What? Look... things like credit card numbers and passwords to online accounts aren't "classified data", but they certainly *can* be stolen. Plans for as yet unreleased products can still be stolen, even if they're plans for devices with no military application at all. On the other hand, classified data can include material that people CAN find out from their own observation if they happen to be in the right place at the right time. Like whether a particular vessel is in a particular location... individual o
Not all data on government systems belongs to the government. Some of it is proprietary information owned by private individuals and institutions and licensed or otherwise made available to the DHS (for a rather obvious example to prove my point, Windows is licensed from Microsoft, you can't get a copy of Windows for the price of a FOIA request).
"Unclassified" doesn't mean valueless or null, etc. "Classified" data is that which has an impact (of varying degrees) on national security. "Unclassified" is all data that isn't in one of the "Classified" categories.
By itself or in normal amounts or normal handling, Unclassified has no impact on nat'l security. Nat'l security has nothing to do with what *the*company* considers important.
Examples: almost all contractor's business info that doesn't overlap class. stuff, source code to company tools, blue
Federal law-enforcement officials said the FBI was taking a look at the incidents -- and Unisys's response -- but said the allegations were so far not viewed as a major breach of national security. "The FBI is making sure that this was not something out of the ordinary," one official said, noting that attempts by hackers to infiltrate U.S. government computers are "everyday occurrences.
I think we can find a government contractor that will put Mr. Dobbs in a position to roll, however due to this month's annual red tape increase, we might have to form a committee to discuss the appointment of those that will oversee the bidding procedure of the swiss banks that will reroute the deferred compensation from the winning contractor to the appropriately untraceable accounts. The whole process might realistically be completed in 50 years or so, which may seem like a long time, but rest assured the
One Million Dollars. (Score:3, Funny)
No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Unisys alone makes over one million dollars a year!
Dr. Evil: Really?
No.2: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Evil: That's a number. Okay then. We hold the Department of Homeland Security ransom for.....One Point Seven BILLION DOLLARS!!
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Have you seen Unisys' quarterly reports recently? I'm not quite sure that's the case.
(joking. They still make a ton of money. Just not as much as they need to support themselves.)
Incompetence on both ends (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, Unisys may have screwed up, but then again, its all about the better mousetrap and all...
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Security is actually the quest for the better mousetrap. The problem is, as soon as you have it, you get to
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What I blame is the way contracts are. A contract specifies what is to be done, and a company will do that, to the point, and not an inch more. There is some regulation, written more than a year ago (in security terms, somewhere in antediluvian times), and that regulation is upheld. Why or for what, nobody cares.
And unless that attitude towards security, or any procedure,
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Some security rules or procedures are drafted and never reviewed.
E
Re:Incompetence on both ends - Gov't BS (Score:3, Insightful)
"Sir, there appears to be atta
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Page 2? (Score:2, Informative)
Here is page 1 anyway: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/23/AR2007092301471.html?nav=rss_business [washingtonpost.com]
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Cyber (Score:3)
Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Damn (Score:2)
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Typical govt C&A hokum (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Typical govt C&A hokum (Score:4, Informative)
Far more money gets spent on documenting that the system works correctly than actually making the system work correctly. Often you end up with a system that looks great on paper that has lots of bugs in actual operation. Lots of tests get written that look like they test something but which rarely uncover bugs. The whole exercise costs a fortune, and largely exists to satisfy auditors (whether internal or external to the company performing the exercise).
Techniques like agile programming, automated testing, code reviews, etc are shunned because they're non-traditional and don't generate lots of paper. There is a fear that in an audit a government representative who hasn't signed on to the methodology might hammer you to death over not having a 2000 page design specification and a load of tests written and executed by everybody from the programmers, to IT QA, to end users (often the same exact test gets reformatted and run by all parties just so that it can be said that everybody had a hand in testing).
I once had to evaluate whether it was safe to directly modify a particular database field in an application, and was relieved to see that this application had one of those aforementioned thick design specifications. Then I was dismayed to find out that the only documentation there was on the field was the fact that it existed, what table it was in, what it was called, what kind of field it was, and what it contained (WidgetCorrectionFactor = Factor used to Correct the Widget value - really helpful as if I couldn't have guessed that much from the field name!). Absent was any kind of documentation as to what code might reference that field or what tables might join to it. I could search the source for the field name, but then there wasn't any kind of documentation or flow charts indicating the typical system workflow or in what order the various routines might get called. It was like documenting all the cell types in an animal without bothering to indicate what the actual animal looked like and how everything went together. But the auditors loved the document.
The issue is that most often QA and management and external auditors have no way of knowing whether a piece of code actually works or not. So, instead they look for stuff they can understand - paperwork. The paperwork does tend to lead to some basic form of quality, but rarely does it lead to code that doesn't break down on all the various one-off-cases that don't make their way into human-executed tests. I'll take a simple automated test that can be executed against a matrix of input values against a complex human-executed test that only ever gets run once (and is likely not repeated every time a piece of seemingly-unrelated code is touched) any day!
Parent
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"Configuration Management is a serious engineering discipline!"
Unysis (Score:2, Interesting)
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Well, (Score:2)
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Appearantly they mean whoever wants to hack their customers and not their customers with that statement, but you can't say that they're lying.
Unisys? (Score:3, Funny)
They Have the Way Out!(TM)
Dan Quayle's DEA record? (it's the coverup) (Score:2)
As
1.7 billion (Score:3, Funny)
What I want to know is what the hell could cost 1.7 billion dollars? Are they putting HA systems with redundant fiber channel SANs on every desktop? How big is the DHS? If were talking even 100,000 people that's over $17,000 per person in IT costs. For that kind of money they should have had big time segmentation with all kinds of traffic monitoring and IDSes along with honeypots and tarpits. Hell, for that kinda money I would even include fart detectors.
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For reference, see SOX.
And in any case... (Score:3, Informative)
FWIW, Unisys didn't exist in the seventies. I was there. I worked on both types of kit (in those days you either went with the herd and learned to use IBM, or you learned to be versatile).
IIRC it came about via the merging of Burroughs and Sperry/UNIVAC in about 1986 (in fact, to be specific, I think Burroughs swallowed Sperry).
Re:Typical unisys (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a big part of the problem. The vast majority of Government Contractors are only marginally qualified and got their jobs by having the clearance, not by being technically proficient. This is known as "warm bodies" syndrome since many contracts pay per position filled. Getting a clearance can take years, depending on the level, and usually takes months, so this is a high barrier to entry and keeps a lot of smart people out.
There are many very capable and well-qualified people in Government Contracting, but they are a minority. Of course, Management, being what it is, doesn't want to give bad news to a customer, so sometimes they "muddy the waters".
Parent
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Re:Typical unisys (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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I know this, because I worked for IBM in a government data center at the time. We handled the big iron (oddly enough, including some machines from Sun and some ancient AS/400s) and the Unisys flunkies did operations and tape library stuff (cartridge and reel to reel). DOT, IRS, etc stuff. Believe it or not, they had PCs in there running Win95 and NT4 with no egress filtering to the internet... There were qui
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Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I'm a former full-time employee of Unisys, and used to do pre-sales architecture and systems engineering for them. On one particular contract we worked on, there were a couple of us full-timers to do architecture, another to handle the PM angle, several short-timers to do write code and DBA work, and a couple of outsourced coders.
Also, a PM outsourced from our Indian contractor.
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I fart in your general direction !
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circle of competitors and those competitors rehire most of the people who were on the contract.
In fact that is so common you usually take your tenure / seniority with you to the
next company. When a contract changes hands, it really means the management layer
and the interface between management and the government is being changed. Workers
by and large keep their jobs.
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How did "never made it out of the seventies" and "probably outsourced... to india" make it into the same post? Might I recommend you read and/or watch The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commanding_Heights:_The_Battle_for_the_World_Economy [wikipedia.org]
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Out-of-country non-nationals are not about to be supporting contracts to DoD or DHS that require security clearances.
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If I could get her to lie about her age I swear I'd rent her out as a consultant. She can evrn make the VCR stop flashing 12.
Come to think of it I'll paypal anybody $5 who can show me a picture of a vcr flashing 12 inside Unisys.
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On the other hand, classified data can include material that people CAN find out from their own observation if they happen to be in the right place at the right time. Like whether a particular vessel is in a particular location... individual o
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I don't know. You don't know, either.
Not all data on government systems belongs to the government. Some of it is proprietary information owned by private individuals and institutions and licensed or otherwise made available to the DHS (for a rather obvious example to prove my point, Windows is licensed from Microsoft, you can't get a copy of Windows for the price of a FOIA request).
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By itself or in normal amounts or normal handling, Unclassified has no impact on nat'l security. Nat'l security has nothing to do with what *the*company* considers important. Examples: almost all contractor's business info that doesn't overlap class. stuff, source code to company tools, blue
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Federal law-enforcement officials said the FBI was taking a look at the incidents -- and Unisys's response -- but said the allegations were so far not viewed as a major breach of national security. "The FBI is making sure that this was not something out of the ordinary," one official said, noting that attempts by hackers to infiltrate U.S. government computers are "everyday occurrences.
Good point (Score:2)