Posted by
Steve on Friday, June 24, 2011 10:59:36 AM
Word leaked out yesterday that an offshoot of the anarchist group Anonymous broke into the DPS computers and stole some information. On first glance, that should be a terrible thing. Groups like Anonymous have been breaking into government computers for months and creating havoc. In this case, the information they obtained was basically no big deal. They did find out some names of spouses that were released by this group, but that was the worst.
Most of the information was old information on tactics used to capture people on warrants. The next largest bit of information was memos send to local agencies. These memos to local agencies were not of the classified variety, but generally not for public consumption. But even so, these memos were generally old and out of date. The rest of the information was private communication between DPS officers or the public.
While DPS basically dodged a bullet on this one, it highlights a problem the agency has of inadequate security. If this group could hack into their email system and capture all this information it highlights the problem of lax security measures. Barry Young of KFYI said that one of the passwords used by a DPS officer was 12345. That has to be the least secure password someone could come up with. With passwords like that, they deserved to be hacked. DPS needs to establish some rules to insure that the passwords used by DPS officers are a bit more secure than 12345.
Any computer system that relies on people to input passwords can be hacked. That is just a fact of life. People are the weak link. But, people need to use these systems so that will always be a problem. You can make passwords more secure, DPS evidently had not established that level of security. I am sure that after this hack, DPS will establish new rules for passwords that will insure that the next time they are hacked it will be much more difficult.
Hackers are a fact of life in today’s world. Hackers would spend their time better if they were designing computer systems that were more difficult to hack, but the usual computer hacker is not interested in making things better. The usual computer hacker is usually an anarchist or someone that just wants to make some mischief. The anarchists are the dangerous ones. They hack computer systems to see how much damage they can cause. They leak information and do other nefarious things that are embarrassing and dangerous. The mischief makers are less of a problem. They just hack into systems to see if they can. Once they get in, they look around and get out. They generally do not leak information or do any real damage. They might cause some inadvertent damage, but it is usually limited in scope. The anarchist’s damage is almost always wide spread and very dangerous.
Computer security is something everyone needs to worry about. Unfortunately, just like the DPS officer with the password 12345, people get lax in their security measures. This happens because people get lazy in their security. Nothing bad happens for a long time and so people think nothing ever will go wrong. Then when it does, the problem is so much worse. Security is something you have to worry about all of the time.