Cyber warfare: Capitol staffers aren’t ready

Congressional staffers are the gateway to all lawmaking on the Hill, but they also may be unwittingly opening the door to hackers.

The Hill’s networks are under constant attack. In 2013 alone, the Senate Sergeant at Arms’ office said it investigated 500 potential examples of malicious software, some from sophisticated attackers and others from low-level scammers. And that’s just the serious cases — in a different measurement, the House IT security office said in 2012 it blocked 16.5 million “intrusion attempts” on its networks.

But the thousands of men and women who keep Congress running every day are committing the basic cybersecurity mistakes that attackers can exploit to do harm — like in the CENTCOM social media hack or crippling breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

POLITICO interviews with nearly a dozen current and former staffers, as well as congressional IT security staff, reveal a typical array of poor cyber habits.

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N.S.A. Breached North Korean Networks Before Sony Attack, Officials Say

According to The New York Times, the trail that led American officials to blame North Koreafor the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agencyscrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.

Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South Korea and other American allies, according to former United States and foreign officials, computer experts later briefed on the operations and a newly disclosed N.S.A. document.

A classified security agency program expanded into an ambitious effort, officials said, to place malware that could track the internal workings of many of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers, a force that South Korea’s military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people. Most are commanded by the country’s main intelligence service, called the Reconnaissance General Bureau, and Bureau 121, its secretive hacking unit, with a large outpost in China.

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