my mom has worked for the state government for a loong time. gaining access and eventually control of her terminal and those around her (for which all you need is a name and you’ve got driving records, tax records and criminal history, all kindsa stuff) wouldn’t be difficult, especially if you did it on a day when someone spilled something on their keyboard so they just think their computer’s doing shit all on its own because of that. the best part is, someone spills something on their keyboard, or in the back of their monitor, or on their tower…every day. you’ve got a whole bunch of people on one side of the security who don’t know anything about it, don’t know how it works or what any of it means. on the other side of the security are a whole lot of people just waiting for something like an orange julius down the vents in a monitor. it’d surely be nice if all sorts of our governments would spend money on computer training instead of, say, new desks for office managers, thousand dollar employee lunches, gifts from one employee to another…shit like that.

For one ANY govt employees should have to have to be assigned a security agreement when they get the job. Accessing the net while on a computer with sensitive information is dangerous enough from “Electronic Espionage Experts”, without having some idoit piss on national security because he cant wait til the hooker arrives. I was Army, i had security clearance and I was responsible for ANYTHING that I was privy to. Theres many people at fault but if the numbskull had been doing anything he wouldnt be getting fired for this wouldnt have occurred. Blame whoever you want, HE made a decision, HE broke security, and HE pushed the button.

My two cents:

Any office or business (government or otherwise) Should be keeping antivirus up to date. Having a Trojan, virus, or other malware is utterly unacceptable. It may be understandable to be vulnerable to attack for up to a week after a new threat is released. however ANY anti virus should be checking for updates at least once a week, and scans should be performed at least once a week.

So, given the worst case a computer would be vulnerable for less than 7 days (assuming updates are scheduled to be applied before scans are scheduled.)

I suspect the employee was fired not because that the virus was there, but because in most ANY place of employment viewing porn at work is agenst policy. Its a HUGE liability for a sexual harassment lawsuit. Its blatant miss use of company resources for both systems, time and bandwidth.

but getting to the point. Why was this in the news? why does it stir up such debate? because 1. Its a government agency, and we as a society expect our government officials to be doing “good” and someone has been caught doing something “bad”. 2. because it involved potential compromise of personal data and/or confidential information. 3. because (GASP!) it shows the fallibility of government network resources.

So begins the blame game. We feel something wrong has been done. An injustice committed. As such we demand the guilty be found and punished accordingly! But who do we blame? The misguided employee who thinks its ok to surf for porn at work and got a virus from the websites? The IT department for failing to follow good practices in maintaining anti virus definitions, updates and scans, or using web filtering? Or do we blame the author of the software? do w blame the person who placed the Trojan on the porn site? do we blame the porn site that had the Trojan on it? The possibilities are endless.

Personally I think that the employee deserved to be fired, surfing for porn on the job is just plain stupid. The IT department needs to be reprimanded for not providing for the security of the network in a timely manner, and changes in policy need to be implemented as well. Any and all traceable information needs to be given to the proper authorities to attempt to research the origin of the Trojan and the party receiving information thru it. And the web master for the porn site should be contacted to advise them of malware being spread via their services.

well i hope the IT dept will purchase the equip to block this kind of access. also i hope the dirve in question after the data is saved for evidence for any criminal trial which i doubt is wiped or replaced in many companies the IT dept is considered the 1st place to cut and the 1st place to complain…

Americans are fond of saying that India has a great education system which produces so many engineers. However, in the state of Andra Pradesh, the singing of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” has been outlawed, for fear that children will become too Westernized. The state legislature, controlled by the fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), decreed that children should receive more education in Hindu values.

http://www.excite.co.jp/News/odd/00081150350974.html

OK, there are a few things wrong here:

A. Nobody should be stupid enough to be surfing porn at work.

B. The IT dept should be smart enough to have updated antio-malware pushed to all the workstations

C. There should have been anti-pr0n filters on the network.

D. The only good trojans are purchased at the pharmacy

E. Online pr0n isn’t worth surfing

PORN IS AWSOME

they used use macs next time lol

That guy deserves to get fired. The fact that you’re on a state regulated computer should make you paranoid enough to not do anything stupid. And who has time to jerk it at work anyway? As for them not recognizing the software, that’s their fault. The gov is supposed to be on top of that stuff… Where’s Chloe O’Brien when you need her?

State government is redundant. Why does Oregon state government exist? How does their government differ from the other 49 state governments? And city government? Ever sit in on a city council meeting? The ayes have it. We are morons for allowing the huge watse of money on thousands of city housing agencies in many many cities. Don’t fire the employee. What did he do? What do any of these people do? Who needs them? Let’s outsource it to highest bidder when we do find a need. And let us continue to consume.

I used to use avast nd noticed it doesn’t work well on multi-language programs sand uses too much CPU speed. I now prefer Kaspersky

Kaspersky is much better software

Kaspersky includes a pop-upblocker, firewall, automatic updates, automatic scans(several), Web Mail scanning, Anti spy and hacker, and a system that finds malware that is not in teh database(aka brand spankin new virus)

The repercussions are that the person was fired (and rightly so). What else could be done?

While I haven’t waded through all of these comments (just the first dozen or so), one thing that I think helps contribute to these types of problems is the “one-size-fits-all” software rollout that most IT departments employ. While I realize that tons of time is spent supporting end users and their systems and that a good disk image or installer script makes the load lighter, I’ve often marvelled at how many employees have access to applications they just don’t need.

It seems commonplace to just load up MS Office Professional and several other apps and call it a day. No one questions whether certain positions need Outlook, Access, or IE, it just gets handed to them like name badges on their first day. Often, there is no training to go with these new applications and thus the nightmare begins. People who may never have owned or used a computer before in their lives now have the latest and greatest system at their finger tips.

I’ve seen shop floor assembly workers with full blown systems that have Office w/Outlook and full web access. The reality is that they may get two emails a month and only use Office to open Word formated procedures. All they really need is Word or PDF reader software so they can view those procedures and someone to hand them the couple of memos which come from HR or whatnot throughout the month. But the get the whole shebang and then surf the web or play Solitare or Hearts on their breaks and at lunchtime. If they didn’t have access to as many apps/services, they couldn’t cause as many problems.

I realize that this would take some extra work and that it would affect Enteprise Licensing budgets and a variety of other like issues, but considering the cost of cleaning up some of these messes, would those costs be justified in the long run.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5430343841227974645