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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSpecial Report: 2020 U.S. census plagued by hacking threats, cost overruns
TECHNOLOGY NEWS DECEMBER 4, 2019 / 7:06 AM / UPDATED 2 HOURS AGO
Nick Brown 20 min Read
(Reuters) - In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau faced a pivotal choice in its plan to digitize the nations once-a-decade population count: build a system for collecting and processing data in-house, or buy one from an outside contractor.
The bureau chose Pegasystems Inc, reasoning that outsourcing would be cheaper and more effective.
Three years later, the project faces serious reliability and security problems, according to Reuters interviews with six technology professionals currently or formerly involved in the census digitization effort. And its projected cost has doubled to $167 million about $40 million more than the bureaus 2016 cost projection for building the site in-house.
The Pega-built website was hacked from IP addresses in Russia during 2018 testing of census systems, according to two security sources with direct knowledge of the incident. One of the sources said an intruder bypassed a firewall and accessed parts of the system that should have been restricted to census developers.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-census-technology-specialreport/special-report-2020-u-s-census-plagued-by-hacking-threats-cost-overruns-idUSKBN1Y81H8
defacto7
(13,485 posts)The more the better. It points to the weaknesses and if the system providers are smart they'll learn from it and plug the holes. The stupid thing is that Russia hacked it to begin with. They pointed out where the issues are and most of all that the system could be hacked. If an intruder is smart they won't show their cards and rely on the companies self confidence to keep them vulnerable.
One thought is that the Russian hackers were just causing trouble because they really don't have any real capability to disturb the census much... or they're just as stupid as our arrogant right wingers.