Your tax dollars at work

[clownboy]

Yeah, these are the folks we trust to spend our dollars wisely. :roll:

US agency baffled by modern technology, destroys mice to get rid of viruses
$170,000 of PCs, printers, keyboards, cameras, and mice destroyed in gross overreaction.
by Peter Bright - July 8 2013, 4:00pm PDT

The Economic Development Administration (EDA) is an agency in the Department of Commerce that promotes economic development in regions of the US suffering slow growth, low employment, and other economic problems. In December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security notified both the EDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that there was a possible malware infection within the two agencies' systems.

The NOAA isolated and cleaned up the problem within a few weeks.

The EDA, however, responded by cutting its systems off from the rest of the world—disabling its enterprise e-mail system and leaving its regional offices no way of accessing centrally held databases.

It then recruited an outside security contractor to look for malware and provide assurances that not only were EDA's systems clean, but also that they were impregnable against malware. The contractor, after some initial false positives, declared the systems largely clean but was unable to provide this guarantee. Malware was found on six systems, but it was easily repaired by reimaging the affected machines.

EDA's CIO, fearing that the agency was under attack from a nation-state, insisted instead on a policy of physical destruction. The EDA destroyed not only (uninfected) desktop computers but also printers, cameras, keyboards, and even mice. The destruction only stopped—sparing $3 million of equipment—because the agency had run out of money to pay for destroying the hardware.

The total cost to the taxpayer of this incident was $2.7 million: $823,000 went to the security contractor for its investigation and advice, $1,061,000 for the acquisition of temporary infrastructure (requisitioned from the Census Bureau), $4,300 to destroy $170,500 in IT equipment, and $688,000 paid to contractors to assist in development of a long-term response. Full recovery took close to a year.

The full grim story was detailed in the Department of Commerce audit released last month, subsequently reported by Federal News Radio.

The EDA's overreaction is, well, a little alarming. Although not entirely to blame—the Department of Commerce's initial communication with EDA grossly overstated the severity of the problem (though corrected its error the following day)—the EDA systematically reacted in the worst possible way. The agency demonstrated serious technical misunderstandings—it shut down its e-mail servers because some of the e-mails on the servers contained malware, even though this posed no risk to the servers themselves—and a general sense of alarmism.

More at Source

 

[Aderleth]

Well... rodents carry diseases, so naturally computer mice carry computer viruses. Makes total sense.

 

[specklebang]

Those were Chinese tax dollars. So wasting them doesn't matter.

They should have gotten a cat.

 

[davidtaylorjr]

Yeah, these are the folks we trust to spend our dollars wisely. :roll:

So they waste money, and they are idiots.

 

[Lutherf]

If they'd made a call to DHS somebody could have put a few of those billion+ rounds of .40 cal to good use.

 

[The General]

Yeah, these are the folks we trust to spend our dollars wisely. :roll:

The only resin they stopped braking their equipment is that they ran out of money.

 

[code1211]

Is there any way to have the various departments of the Federal Government conduct competitions for increased budgets in war games using live ammo?

We have a good system going in the Middle East right now with Arabs killing Persians and Vice Versa. If we could somehow get the NSA to kill the IRS and vice versa, we'd have something good going on the home front, too.