Hackers put more heat on security staffs
Connecting state and local government leaders
Over a few days in June, nine state Web sites fell victim to attacks by a hacker group called World of Hell.
Over a few days in June, nine state Web sites fell victim to attacks by a hacker group called World of Hell.
The hackers pasted graffiti on sites operated by the Texas lottery and Georgia's Transportation Department Web pages, the Virginia and Vermont state home pages and the New Mexico Retiree Health Care Authority, among others. They placed the World of Hell logo and a message about getting rid of Microsoft Windows NT and using Unix on each of the sites.
World of Hell's cybervandalism was more annoying than harmful, but it did illustrate the severe and evolving security threat to state sites.
As states increasingly adopt electronic government, information technology agencies are scram-bling to catch up with the growing cybervandalism threat, officials said.
A recent audit of Maryland's judicial information system illustrates the problem. Auditors with the Legislative Services Department found inadequate security in several areas, including how often passwords were changed, how the system's firewall was administered and how closely mainframe access was monitored.
Obvious weaknesses
Even though the judicial system's computers have never been hacked into, the audit showed the system's many weaknesses. And Maryland is not alone in trying to stay ahead of the security curve, according to Larry Kettlewell, senior executive security policy officer for the Kansas Administration Department.
Kettlewell sees security issues looming as large as the year 2000 date rollover.
'The biggest problem seems to be with all the emphasis states are placing on e-government and e-commerce, we have to be a lot more open with our systems,' he said. 'It is a little more difficult to configure a network to make it open enough for people to use,but secure enough so hackers can't break into them.'
Kettlewell is not alone in his view. Chris Dixon, digital government issues coordinator for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, said his organization recently put together a security and liability team to look at security issues.
'In Kansas, we have done several things over the last couple of months to increase communications such as passing around pings from IP addresses that may be unusual,' he said. Pings are signals that can be used to find open ports in a Web host, highlighting a potential security weakness.
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