Federal agencies responsible for safeguarding millions of Americans' security, public safety and personal data have failed to apply even basic defenses to cyberattacks, Senate report finds
Among the sensitive information that has been at risk for years are financial data for students and parents applying for college loans on file with the Education Department; payroll and banking information for would-be buyers seeking to qualify for home loans, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and U.S. citizens' travel records, at Homeland Security, the report said.
All eight of the agencies are using woefully outdated systems, the report found. Homeland Security — the agency most responsible for protecting Americans' physical safety — still uses Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 on many of its systems, it said.Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said federal agencies reported 35,277 cyberincidents in 2017 alone.
Social Security has a similar problem, according to the report: Its system to store retirement and disability information for millions of Americans uses a programming language that was first developed in the 1950s, and most of the people who know how to use it have either retired or are about to. At the Education Department, meanwhile, systems have been unable to prevent unauthorized outside devices from easily connecting to the department's network going back as far as 2011, it said.
The Education Department did report last year that it had managed to work out how to limit unauthorized access to about 90 seconds. But the report said that's more than enough time for a malicious actor to"launch an attack or gain intermittent access to internal network resources" — including millions of Americans' personally identifying data.
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