xtremereign wrote:
That is freaking ridiculous. E-mail is hardly a costly investment, what the hell kinda retards does the government have working for them in IT? This story alone is enough to make me want to evade taxes for the rest of my life.
Are you an expert on network security? Have you ever been involved in actually securing an internet connected site other then your home computer?
90% of home security is what's called "security through obscurity". You don't need to put anything more then a simple firewall up, becuase no one's actually targetting you. You're at worse someone who might get dinged via a random port scan on a subnet somewhere.
Government and corporate sites are targets. People choose to hack .gov sites. They choose to hack large corporate sites. They do this, not for fun, but because those sites contain data that's useful and valuable. And the quality of the hacker is far beyond the script kiddie that might, if you're unlucky, send a virus your way. It is *very* expensive to secure those sites. And guess what? Email is one of the hardest things to secure. I can have the most secure multi-layered firewall system in the world, but if there's a hack embedded inside a compressed file in an email that gets sent inside that firewall and uncompressed and run, none of that helped. And the guys targetting .gov sites aren't using stuff that's already included in your basic virus scanner. Security that works for the home does *not* work at larger sites.