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Message-ID: <04Mar30.085026cest.118366@fd.hif.hu>
From: adam at hif.hu (Szilveszter Adam)
Subject: Re: Microsoft Coding / National Security Risk
madsaxon wrote:
> The US military is considerably more rigorous than the civilian
> government in this regard, but even then there are systems which
> have slipped through the cracks. Evidence for this is the fact that
> Web defacement mirrors still occasionally contain both .gov and
> .mil entries.
Not to rain on your parade, but public web site defacements in the gov
sector certainly show very little of the state of internal network
security. Nowadays public web servers are often outsourced to a colo
facility, and are not very much locked down either, since these are
often not the same systems that provide the intranet services that the
organisation depends on. While having a breach on your public web
servers doesn't look nice, it's mostly not critical either, you simply
take the server off the net and rebuild it when you have time. After
all, it is more for information of the public than for anything else:
nice to have, but nothing breaks if it doesn't work. Therefore the costs
of locking it down may outweigh the possible cost of compromise. It is
like saying: since there is graffiti on the walls of the police station,
the police force sucks. I'd rather they went after the more serious
offenses instead of making sure that nobody can spray their walls.
Regards:
Sz.
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