NSA Plans to Eliminate System Administrators
From the SANS email newsletter today:
(August 9, 2013)
In an effort to reduce the risk of information leaks, the US National Security Agency (NSA) plans to get rid of 90 percent of its contracted system administrator positions. NSA Director General Keith Alexander said that the agency plans to move to an automated cloud infrastructure. Speaking on a panel along with FBI Director Robert Mueller at a security conference in New York, Alexander referred to the recent revelations about the scope of NSA surveillance, noting that "people make mistakes. But ... no one has willfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade ... civil liberties or privacy."
LINKS:
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nsa-cut-system-administrators-90-percent-limit-data-access-6C10884390
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/nsa-directors-answer-to-security-first-lay-off-sysadmins/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/09/snowden_nsa_to_sack_90_per_cent_sysadmins_keith_alexander/
(Editor's Note (Paller): A huge revelation to executives of the Snowden affair is illuminated in this decision by NSA. System administrators are powerful - too powerful. In the mainframe era, IBM and its customers invested 15 years (1967-1982) building strong controls into computers, specifically to constrain the power of the systems programmers. System administrators are now as powerful as system programmers were in the 60s and 70s, and are unconstrained. NSA is in
the vanguard of a major shift coming to every organization that cares about security. The immediate implementation of the top 4 controls in the 20 Critical Controls is a core survival task for IT security organizations. See Raising the Bar for evidence (http://csis.org/publication/raising-bar-cybersecurity).
Organizations failing to implement those quickly should anticipate an unstoppable board-level push to outsource system administration and management to the cloud providers.
(My comment: If you're a systems administrator, you may be out of a job due to this situation - your job is much more likely now to be outsourced. Whether you consider Snowden a hero or a villian, this could cost jobs)
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