Government agencies continue to be hot targets for cybercriminals.
The U.S. Census Bureau was the target of a cyberattack in January 2020, but hackers were unsuccessful in maintaining access to the system, according to a watchdog report released this week.
The Associated Press says the cyberattack did not involve the 2020 census data.
Here is what the AP reports on the cyberattack:
"According to the Office of Inspector General, the Census Bureau missed opportunities to limit its vulnerability to the attack and didn't discover and report the attack in a timely manner. The statistical agency also failed to keep sufficient system logs, which hindered the investigation, and was using operating system no longer supported by the vendor, the watchdog report said.
The bureau's firewalls stopped the attacker's attempts to maintain access to the system through a backdoor, but unauthorized changes were still made, including the creation of user accounts, the report said."
Ron Jarmin, Acting Director of the Census Bureau, says that none of the systems used in the 2020 census were compromised and the overall head count was not affected.
"Furthermore, no systems or data maintained and managed by the Census Bureau on behalf of the public were compromised, manipulated or lost," Jarmin said.
The OIG made nine recommendations to the Census Bureau to improve its cybersecurity.
[RELATED: U.S. Federal Agencies Get C- on Cyber Report Card]
Census servers intriguing target for cybercriminals
The data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau is used to determine the number of seats each state has in the House of Representatives and to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds to local communities.
The information collected in the census includes general population statistics as well as economic information in industries and regions of the U.S.
This data would be tremendously valuable were a cybercriminal able to get their hands on it.
Andrew Barratt, Managing Principal of Solutions and Investigations at Coalfire, discusses this recent cyberattack:
"Census records systems are always an interesting target. From a PII perspective, they are an Aladdin's cave of data, typically with highly specific demographic information and essentially a potential authoritative source on identity.
The disclosure offers up some common failings but with a glimmer of hope that defenses were considered. Preventing back doors or a persistent threat usually requires the defense to assume compromise during the process of designing their systems. However, the lack of access logs, monitoring, and out of date systems perhaps shows where budgets have been trimmed and unfortunately created a false economy for the tax dollars spent. This is usually an indication of a technical first approach to defense but lacking in a broader, more strategic view and perhaps a lack of adoption of one of the many federally approved frameworks.
This is frustrating given the potential data at risk, and perhaps an element of fortune that the intruder didn't get any further. The question will remain: with such limited monitoring and logging, will they have been able to detect a further compromise that put census data at risk?"
