FAA Network Hacked

coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration has joined the growing list of government agencies that have had their supposedly safe systems hacked. The agency this week notified about 45,000 employees that one of its servers was hacked into and employee personal identity information was stolen. The FAA was quick to say the server that was accessed was not connected to the operation of the air traffic control system or any other FAA operational system. It did say two of the 48 files on the breached computer server contained personal information about more than 45,000 FAA employees and retirees who were on the FAA's rolls as of the first week of February 2006."

operation of the air traffic control system

[captainpanic]

I'm assuming that the operation of the air traffic control system is not connected to the internet in ANY way at all?

Some questions:
1. Is being offline a guarantee for not being hacked? (How else than through the cable / wifi can you hack into a network)?
2. Is the FAA indeed offline?

Whatever

[SatanicPuppy]

We know the air traffic control computers weren't hacked...There hardly are any, which is in itself a problem.

But being sloppy with data is a bad sign in any organization. If you can't keep your secure data secure, then what other important things are you also letting slide?

Having worked at the USDOT..

[bleh-of-the-huns]

Of which the FAA is apart of, I can say, with absolute certainty, that like every other major entity, there are literally dozens and dozens of systems that are in no way connected to the ATC, or any other network for that matter. Yes they are networked, but so is every desktop and every camera, that does not mean they are not well isolated and secure from each other.

FAA has well over 10k hosts (desktops, servers, etc etc), its unfortunate, but expected that many of those hosts are probably vulnerable to something. But at the same time, critical systems (ATC for example), are generally isolated from the basic FAA backbone, and on a closed network.

Re:NOTE: This is NOT the ATC network

[Arthur Grumbine]

I've always wondered how often I can get modded informative for repeating a statement in the summary...maybe it's time for a broad experiment...

1. Post a re-iteration of something in the summary
2. Piss people off by getting modded "Informative"
3. ???
4. Profit!!

Re:They may have told the current employees...

[Oswald]

I think it's supposed to mean that the FAA is being run like a profit-seeking enterprise when its job is to make sure that actual profit-seeking enterprises (i.e. the airlines) have a safe environment to work in (and that they don't pinch so many pennies trying to eke out a profit that safety suffers). The union, in their usual drama-queen fashion, is trying to say that the FAA is being run on a shoestring by people who think it's their job to blow happy smoke up Congress's collective ass rather than tell them the truth.

As for your first question, the place went from high-intensity, challenging, and interesting to flat-out miserable over the course of my career due to gross mismanagement by the government and the greed of controllers. I have never been so excited to start something as I was my ATC career, and never so happy to see something end (well, maybe my first marriage). I stayed for the retirement package.

Re:Not found

[causality]

Windows cannot find Control Tower. Hit any key to continue.

"Where's the 'any' key?" [bauer-power.net]

Am I the only one who remembers the "ANY" stickers that were usually placed on the ENTER key and were specifically designed for (l)users who kept asking that question? When I first saw them, someone had to explain to me that yes it's a serious product, it's not a joke item or a gag gift. I think I looked at the world a bit differently after that.

If I ever marvel at how even otherwise intelligent people sometimes shut down all common sense and ability to reason when they are in front of a computer, this is an example of what I'm talking about. That they wouldn't even consider whether "any" might be an adjective, or that the sentence should be written differently if it were intended to mean a key bearing the label of "ANY" just blows my mind.

Congres made us safe :)

[yl_mra]

Another illustration of how safe our government made the internet by making it a major crime to hack our networks. It used to be that we could find our way into networks and heckle the administrators. By the rules of the game, we let the admins know what we did and how. That was fun :) and kept our networks secure. Now, it can land you in prison. With all of this safety, how many of you know of middle school kids that got caught hacking into 'secure' systems within the past 10 years? What will happen if a hostile agency really wants to steal our data our bring us down?