NASA Has Been Hacked

If you disable javascript you can read it easily (and much faster, and without ads).

I highly recommend reading the actual audit[1]. There's a lot of good details in there, similar to the Senate report on the Equifax breach a few days ago. There were several problems: the inventory tracking issue was particularly enlightening:

>system administrators did not consistently update the inventory system when they added devices to the network. Specifically, we found that 8 of 11 system administrators responsible for managing the 13 systems in our sample maintain a separate inventory spreadsheet of their systems from which they periodically update the information manually in the ITSDB. One system administrator told us he does not regularly enter new devices into the ITSDB as required because the database’s updating function sometimes does not work and he later forgets to enter the asset information.

Other good notes

Lack of training:

> NIST requires that organizations provide security-related technical training specifically tailored for their assigned duties... As of April 2019, JPL did not have a role-based training program, provide additional IT security training for system administrators, nor fund their IT security certifications.

Refusing to let Department of Homeland Security (DHS) complete a thorough post-intrusion assessment:

>However, according to NASA SOC personnel, JPL was concerned with inadvertent access to its corporate network and feared disruption of mission operations. In addition, JPL was unfamiliar with DHS’s standard engagement procedures. Collectively, resolution of these issues resulted in DHS being unable to perform scans of the entire network until 4 months after the incident was detected.

[1]: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-19-022.pdf

I discussed this recently here on HN [0], the fake spinner is a dark-UI to 'punish' you for opting out. If you just accept the popup disappears immediately.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20131381

Reading the audit, this kind of confirms my base question when building infrastructure: If people don't do the right thing the business needs, why is it too hard to do? Can't we reduce the pain to do the right thing so doing the lazy / wrong thing is harder? People not doing thing tends to be an indication of boundaries and responsibilities being drawn in bad ways.

Something like the log reviews are a classical thing. Training a sysadmin to know all the new hot attacks and patterns they cause in a log is hard, because that world moves fast. It'd be much more effective to task the admin with a well-defined, easily monitored task: . Might need some definition about format and which logs, but all logs go to splunk. And then it's the security guys job to look for malicious patterns in those logs, probably automatically. Ideally with something simple, like elastic-alert, logstash, you name it, from my own stack.

Similar, why do people have to manually enter systems into the host database? It depends on how far you want to automate that, but firewall all systems to access the central registry only, and widen the firewall after an authorized registration of the system. That way, the admins just have to rack systems with a usb stick with some credentials, and it goes or it doesn't.

If basic things are so hard people don't do them, something is structurally wrong.

I don't think that's actually true. Rather, it's an architectural thing — because all these ad systems were designed without consent in mind, accepting is a no-op, whereas refusing consent requires an outbound request to set some sort of "do not track" flag somewhere (presumably as a cookie).