EDA's overreaction to cyber attack highlights every agency's challenge

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/241/3382009/EDAs-overreaction-to-cyber-attack-highlights-every-agencys-challenge

By Jason Miller
Federal News Radio
7/8/2013

The Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration spent almost 
half of its IT budget last year to remediate a cyber attack that barely 
happened.

Commerce's inspector general found in a report released last week a string 
of errors and miscommunications led to EDA's overreaction of removing 
employee email and website access from the main agency network.

EDA's drastic steps to limit the damage by shutting down much of the 
access to the main Herbert Hoover Building network ended up costing the 
agency more than $2.7 million to clean up and reconfigure its network and 
computers. The IG said the bureau destroyed more than $170,000 in IT 
equipment, including desktop computers, printers, keyboards and mice.

But the IG found no evidence of a large scale malware attack, and in fact, 
a series of blunders between EDA and the Commerce Department's incident 
response team led to what turned out to be poor decisions by senior 
leaders, a waste of money and resources and potentially a disruption to 
EDA's mission.

[...]



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