The governmentwide information security report released last month by the Office of Management and Budget is the first serious effort to bring together the executive and legislative branches to solve the monumental job of securing federal systems, which, admittedly, have as many holes as Swiss cheese.. . .
The governmentwide information security report released last month by the Office of Management and Budget is the first serious effort to bring together the executive and legislative branches to solve the monumental job of securing federal systems, which, admittedly, have as many holes as Swiss cheese.

The report, required by the Government Information Security Reform Act of 2000, was refreshingly honest. Indeed, many federal systems have serious security weaknesses. But that wasn't the big news laid out in the GISRA report. Rather, the report now organizes secu.rity data into a matrix that the White House and Capitol Hill can use to pinpoint problems and work toward a solution.

The report should provide a blueprint for Congress, which, as a whole, has shown that it does not fully understand the shortcomings of federal information security and its consequences. It was just a few years ago, when compiling the Defense Department's fiscal 1999 budget, that the Senate Appropriations Committee nearly zeroed out DOD's $70 million budget to fight information warfare and replaced it with a $500,000 line item for software security research. The budget was later reinstated. Agencies have not been without fault, either. Many are just now putting in place security policies required by the 15-year-old Computer Security Act.

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