Loss of savings is a daily concern for many people since the economic meltdown more than two years ago. Lately, there have been more threats of loss of savings due to security vulnerabilities in the U.S. government. A new report by the Government Accountability Office states that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation lacks adequate encryption of "sensitive information transmitted over its network." It also found that the FDIC has "inconsistent identification and authentication user controls" and needs to beef up its internal monitoring and auditing practices. One example the GAO cited was the existence of default installation user ideas on some of its UNIX servers. Another is that the data network and voice network are both on the same network.
I'm not a heavy duty UNIX administrator, but I know enough about UNIX. It's an open system that is widely used in servers, on workstations and in mobile devices. It's critical that companies have policies and firewalls in place to avoid unauthorized penetration of their systems.
It's ironic that after all these years, the FDIC increased its insurance protection in case banks went under. Now people have to worry that their savings might be lost because of inadequate data security.
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