GAO: SEC needs to follow its own security plan
A new GAO report says the SEC's financial data could be accessed by former or disgruntled employees unless proper access management controls are instituted.
The Securities and Exchange Commission could do a better job of protecting its data. Its security plans are outdated and incomplete, and SEC financial data and systems might be vulnerable to tampering, according to a Government Accountability Office report released on April 28.
"SEC did not consistently control logical and physical access to its network, servers, applications and databases; manage its configuration settings; segregate duties; or update its contingency plan," GAO auditors wrote. "These weaknesses existed, in part, because SEC did not effectively implement key elements of its information security program."
The SEC has made some progress on the security front, the report notes, but did not, for instance, properly control access to its systems.
Across its production, disaster recovery and testing environments, 20 users shared a single password. In another case of poor management, GAO said the agency set up a key financial server with a password that would never expire.
SEC data was thereby left open to potential disclosure, modification and destruction from the outside or from anonymous employees.
GAO's report came with half a dozen public recommendations, including conducting a comprehensive inventory of the production environment's systems and applications and dedicating personnel to review continuous monitoring reports.
GAO made another 30 recommendations in a limited-distribution report.
"We have not fully achieved our goals as they relate to implementing our information security program," SEC CIO Pamela Dyson acknowledged in response to the report.
She added that the password issues were fixed right after the close of GAO's audit.