Cliff Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg" about attempts to hack into US military computers. The book was published in 1990 and recounts events that took place in 1986-88. Not too much has changed since then,appprently. One poster has raised the issue of securing the desktop and preventing the installation of software on user's systems. This won't work. The bigger issue is that the majority of governmetn systems are running Windows, MS Office - including Outlook and Internet Explorer. None of which are noted for being secure in and of themselves. Then ther is the question of which ant-virus / malware programmes are in use. Where I work, the default is McAfee. Not the best choice. As for installation of service packs, they have a distressing tendency to break things, especially custom software. So lots of systems aren't patched up.

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