Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 21, 2016

TSA Cybersecurity Failures – The Good News

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Government,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 8:48 pm

The TSA is failing spectacularly at cybersecurity by Violet Blue.

From the post:

Five years of Department of Homeland Security audits have revealed, to the surprise of few and the dismay of all, that the TSA is as great at cybersecurity as it is at customer service.

The final report from the DHS Office of Inspector General details serious persistent problems with TSA staff’s handling of IT security protocols. These issues include servers running software with known vulnerabilities, no incident report process in place, and zero physical security protecting critical IT systems from unauthorized access.

What we’re talking about here are the very basics of IT security, and the TSA has been failing at these quite spectacularly for some time.

Violet reports on a cornucopia of cybersecurity issues with the TSA and its information systems. Including:


As part of this year’s final report, auditors watched TSA staff as they scanned STIP servers located at two DHS data centers and the Orlando International Airport. The scans “detected a total of 12,282 high vulnerabilities on 71 of the 74 servers tested.”

The redacted final report omits the names of the servers and due to space concerns (its only 47 pages long), omits the particulars of the 12,282 high vulnerabilities found. (That’s my assumption, the report doesn’t say that.)

What the report fails to mention is the good news about TSA cybersecurity failures:

Despite its woeful performance on cybersecurity and its utter failure to ever stop a terrorist, there have been no terrorist incidents on US airlines at points guarded by the TSA.

The TSA and its faulty cybersecurity equipment could be retired, en masse, and its impact on the incidence of terrorism on U.S. based air travel would be exactly zero.

Unless you need hacking practice on poorly maintained systems, avoid the TSA and its broken IT systems. Who wants to brag about stealing a candy bar from a vending machine? Do you?

Any cyberoffense against the TSA and its systems will expose you to long prison sentences for breaching systems that make no difference. That’s the definition of a bad deal. Just don’t go there.

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