Security issues during the government shutdown.

US Government Shutdown Creates Serious Cyber Risks: Experts

By Brian Prince on October 10, 2013

Top security experts are expressing grave concern that the government shutdown will seriously compromise the security of the government's information systems. Many agencies have only skeleton crews running the IT departments. There are too few people monitoring the governments sites. The shutdown also degrades the morale of the government IT workers. Even after the shutdown ends, there will be a backlog of work, such as reviewing security logs and installing patches. So security will be weakened for some time after the shutdown ends. Some government websites have completely shutdown.

One expert described the danger in this way, "Another weakness during times like this is that people are easily fooled given that nothing is normal. Traffic patterns are different, the person staffing the desk may be different, with all this change, social engineering attacks can be very effective."

One expert stated that the government could lessen the risks if it had a continuity of business plan to handle such emergencies. The main take away I got from this article is the need to have emergency plans for unusual situations. This article discussed doing risk evaluation in making decisions during a crisis.