Cybersecurity Manpower Shortage
February 8th, 2010 | Sources: Washington PostSubjects: Technology
When a US embassy employee in East Asia clicked on an e-mail attachment in May, 2006, she inadvertently unleashed the largest cyberattack ever launched against the State Department. The breach permitted China-based attackers to insert malicious computer code into the department’s networks throughout the region.
A cyber-threat response team leapt into action and toiled 24/7 for 2 weeks to isolate the code and develop a patch that officials claim prevented a gargantuan breach.
Unfortunately, State is better equipped to handle cyberattacks than other parts of the federal government. And 2 months later, the Bureau of Industry and Security, a part of the Commerce Department that oversees exports of technology that has both commercial and military uses, was attacked in similar fashion.
The attack was not recognized for days and Commerce was never able to determine when the initial intrusion took place (Commerce claims there is no evidence data was compromised as a result).
Commerce and other parts of government are trying to improve their performance in this regard, but their efforts are often stymied by a marked shortage of skilled computer-security workers, from front-line technicians to so called Security Generals.
Meanwhile, according to the Government Accountability Office, the number of probes, scans and attacks reported to the Homeland Security Department’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team more than tripled between 2006 and 2008, from 5,500 to 16,840.
The manpower shortage is impacting Pentagon efforts to staff-up a new Cyber Command and Homeland Security’s plans to increase it’s cyber-staff by 1,000 people over in the next 3 years.
The intense demand has sparked bidding wars among agencies and contractors for a small pool of special talent: skilled technicians with security clearances. Some young people with 3 years’ experience and a clearance are commanding salaries over $100,000.
Philip Reitinger, deputy undersecretary of Homeland Security’s National Protection and Programs Directorate, conceded he couldn’t match private sector pay scales. “But in government,” he told the Washington Post, “one can have a bigger ability to effect change at an earlier place in your career than anywhere else.” he said.
Besides, Reitinger added, “your country needs you.”




Apparently, the FDA has not completed inspecting the insulin manufacturing facilities of N.V. Organon, a third-party supplier to MannKind.
To determine the effect of modern-day running shoes on lower extremity joint torques during running, D. Casey Kerrigan and colleagues from JKM Technologies and the University of Virginia recruited 68 healthy young adult runners (37 women) that used commercially-available running shoes.
That gaping problem arose after Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976 to help protect trade secrets but made it rather easy for manufacturers to bypass normal regulatory scrutiny, even when it involves chemicals that could pose harm to humans.
The recommendation follows release of data from the so-called Jupiter trial, which was sponsored by AZ. In Jupiter, Crestor reduced the risk of heart attacks in apparently healthy adults with no prior history of cardiac disease and normal cholesterol levels.
Purple Pill—
“Some of the patients whom we would classically describe as ‘resistant’ to clopidogrel, in that they showed low levels of platelet inhibition, in fact didn’t actually have clopidogrel on board,” Serebruany told
Brenda Tan and Matt Cost, a pair of students at Trinity High School in Manhattan, recently performed DNA analysis of food items and other objects collected in their homes and surrounding environs.
So you’d think we’d have reached some general agreement on how the stuff affects our health by this time, no?
Sanket Dhruva and colleagues from UCSF drew these conclusions after examining the premarket approval process (PMA) for 78 high-risk cardiovascular devices that received FDA approval between January 2000 and December 2007.
The dead operatives had been begun a campaign against a radical nut job known as Sirajuddin Haqqani and his woefully enslaved followers. This crew has claimed responsibility for killing dozens of US soldiers.
The $1.9 billion buy would be the second consumer-focused company purchased by the Paris-based drug giant in less than a year. The other one was France’s Laboratoire Oenobiol, which makes health and beauty supplements and nutritional products.
Even before the acquisition of Chattem and with little presence in the US consumer products market, Sanofi managed to generate about $2 billion per year in world-wide OTC sales.
Sirt1 is found in many tissues including the liver and pancreas.
That works out to an astonishing clip of 150 prescriptions per day, 7-days per week. It is nearly twice as many as the runner-up prescriber, Huberto Merayo, whose office is just a few blocks from the Prescription King.
It looks as though the attack was part of a large corporate and political phishing ploy that leveraged security flaws in e-mail attachments to break into the networks of at least 34 companies including Yahoo, Symantec, Rackspace, Adobe and Northrop Grumman.
NACHRI, the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions recently briefed Congress on the matter, in an attempt to favorably influence the “debate.”
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