Practical UNIX and Internet Security, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9. Personnel Security

Consider a few personnel incidents that made the news in the last few years:

• Nick Leeson, an investment trader at the Barings Bank office in Singapore, and Toshihide Iguchi of the Daiwa Bank office in New York City, each made risky investments and lost substantial amounts of their bank’s funds. Rather than admit to the losses, each of them altered computer records and effectively gambled more money to recoup the losses. Eventually, both were discovered after each bank lost more than one billion dollars. As a result, Barings was forced into insolvency, and Daiwa may not be allowed to operate in the United States in the future.

• In the U.S., agents and other individuals with high-security clearances at the CIA, the FBI and the Armed Forces (Aldrich Ames, Jonathon Pollard, Robert Hanson, and Robert Walker, to name a few) were discovered to have been passing classified information to Russia and to Israel. Despite several special controls for security, these individuals were able to commit damaging acts of espionage—in some cases, for more than a decade.

• John Deutch, the director of the CIA under President Clinton, was found to have taken classified government information from the Agency to his house, where the information was stored on classified computers configured for unclassified use and appropriately marked as “unclassified.” While the classified information was resident, these same computers were used to access pornographic web sites—web sites that ...