Opaque Lucidity

Disgruntled

A former IT guy for the city of San Francisco has locked everyone out of the city's network. I'm very surprised this doesn't happen more often. The article doesn't mention any specific technical details, so I don't know how secure the network is. Either way, this guy was on the inside, so the external security was probably moot.

Many, many companies with which I am familiar have incredibly insecure networks. In many cases, this lack of security can be traced to a lack of solid education on the subject. Sometimes, it's a lack of concern or the belief that the company has nothing a hacker would be interested in. That fact is that any fast network IS of great interest to hackers who write self-replicating worms, bots and other virus-like bits of code. One that I remember well but whose name escapes me actually installed a small mail server on an infected machine and started sending out copies of itself as an attachment (Hash or Kevin or Ed may have more details on this as my memory fails me). The next thing you know, some company's web server or such has become a huge spam machine.

What scares me about this is that if there was ever a concerted effort to bring down the American or European economies, the attack (especially if coordinated by a nation or a nation's military) could be very successful. I know that we have IT folks looking for this type of attack, but I wonder how strong our defenses really are. I hope we never have to find out.