NYT: Audit Finds Homeland Security Dept. Is Lacking Disaster Backups

Is there no end to reports of this administration's incompetence, malfeasance and chicanery??? LBN runneth over with such reports!


Audit Finds Security Dept. Is Lacking Disaster Backups
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: June 9, 2005


WASHINGTON, June 8 - In a nationwide advertising blitz, the Homeland Security Department has urged businesses and families to "Get Ready Now" for potential terror attacks or other disasters. But an internal audit released on Wednesday concluded that the department had fundamentally failed to follow its own advice.

Computer systems at 19 department sites that served agencies like the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard had no functioning backups or relied on obviously deficient or incomplete backups, the report by the inspector general of the department said. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is in charge of disaster recovery, was unprepared, the report said....

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Adequate backups were lacking for networks that screen airline passengers, that inspect goods moving across borders and that communicate with department employees and outside officials.

Those same agencies, the auditors found, have in most cases failed to prepare sufficiently written disaster recovery plans that would guide operations if a main office or computer system was knocked out. Companies or organizations that are properly prepared generally have arrangements at alternative sites that would let them operate if their computer systems were inaccessible or destroyed.

Top officials at the department did not dispute the conclusions of the report....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/politics/09home.html