CommentaryInsecuring the US Senate

Published 1 February 2007

Insecuring the US Senate:

Does the New Senate Leadership Need a Security Lesson?

By Daniel F. Zubairi, CISSP

As we look at some changes in the leadership of the U.S. Senate resulting from this past November’s mid-term elections, we must ask ourselves whether we are taking a step back in securing our information infrastructure.

Most recently, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) requested that senators and their staffs shut off their computers at the end of each work day. The rationale for this unofficial mandate is to save power and act as an example to government, corporations, and citizens on energy consumption.

This may have been a good idea with good intentions, but the senator failed to take notice of all issues surrounding this idea and did not evaluate all factors when making this proposal.

Federal agencies and corporations, for years, have been struggling to secure their user desktops by ensuring they have the latest critical security updates and have downloaded the latest anti-virus definitions, but this could give improper guidance to the weary government or corporate user. For years, IT managers and CIOs have been encouraging users not to power down their desktops so that after hours their computers may download the most recent operating system and anti-virus updates from either the Internet or in-house update servers. This also gives desktops the ability to run virus assessments on the entire computer, a rather time and computer resource intensive operations. Typically, IT staff configure systems to undergo this update process in the very late night hours when users will not be inconvenienced by a dramatic loss in performance and usability.

So Boxer’s proposal raises the question of whether we are stepping back in information security, or will our new legislative leadership have the insight in the future to weigh all variables before rushing to offer mandates which may potentially increase our information risk level.

-read more about Senator Boxer’s comments in this news report