Well, at least they didn't do something silly like enable backdoors in widely used communications infrastructure or intentionally weaken their encryption standards.
Even my VPS with no public facing content sees a great many attempts at unauthorized access.
So the problem then, is not any "hacking spree" on government agencies, the real problem is government agencies failure to implement acceptable security measures.
You say it like you're blaming them. Do you realize the sheer number of assets they have to protect?
The government knows it will always have a soft exterior due to it's size. This is why they have air-gaps and such strict policies.
A lot of people give the government a ton of flack for how poorly they work but for an entity of their size they do a pretty good job. I'm not saying there isn't obvious room for improvement but they do a fairly good job. Other countries of similar size have much larger infosec issues than the US....you just don't hear about them.
You say it like you're blaming them. Do you realize the sheer number of assets they have to protect?
The thing is that they have very little control over the hacking attempts. They do have control over what they build themselves.
It's tempting to say the hackers are the bad guys, but morality isn't a helpful tool in situations like these. They may as well be an act of god for all the difference it makes.
They don't build it themselves they have contractors. The contractors make mistakes and there isn't enough resources to find/fix them all.
Much of the technical mistakes made by the contractors aren't due to poor engineering it's a lack of funding. Lots of the contracts put out are Lowest Cost Technically Acceptable due to budget problems beyond the control of the people making the decisions.
"mistakes made by the contractors aren't due to poor engineering it's a lack of funding."
So to take healthcare.gov as an example those over worked under paid contractors got something on the order of 300 million. You think the problem was that the project was _under_ funded? Government Contractors more often than not get paid obscene amounts of money for the work they do.
what a coincidence, government agencies hacking private citizens is also a "widespread problem".
If so many "forget the name" agencies weren't really covers for tingly super secret spy stuffs, then maybe more people would give up and go away from the truly boring ones???
<sarcasme>I for the love of the world cannot understand why anyone would do that.</sarcasme>
Seriously, between corruption and global spying, you can be happy none-one has tried to blow them up !
Agreed. It's one thing to disapprove of the NSA's spying, it's another to use that as a reason to cheer for the compromising of (assuming some of the critics are American citizens) your own government's classified data (not even just that of the NSA) and a potentially disastrous vulnerability.
