Meant to post this one yesterday, but got sidetracked. It’s a great reminder of how if you try to make things more user-friendly, you may also significantly compromise security – and in this case a LOT of government files that should be secured better. Aliya Sternstein reports:
The U.S. government recently lassoed together a bunch of intelligence streams inside an FBI website now implicated in an alleged hack of arrest records, personnel data and other confidential material.
The goal of the revamp was to accelerate information sharing among authorized national security personnel, but the new arrangement may have sped too much data to the wrong people.
Hacker activists claim to have broken into the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal, or LEEP, a one-stop-shop for exchanging sensitive, unclassified information across all levels of government.
As reported last year, a network upgrade allows authorities nationwide to log into one website, LEO.gov, and, with one password, travel to other law enforcement and homeland security systems.
Hacktivists, acting in protest of violence against Palestinians, say they copied and leaked information from several of those systems.
Read more on NextGov.