The Equity Factor

Economic Development Administration Wasted Half Its IT Budget on a Simple Virus

If they can’t fix their computers, what does it mean for the rest of the agency?

Credit Stuart Pilbrow.

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Everyone has technical difficulties. Your computer crashed and you lost a paper. You spilled coffee on the keyboard. You forget your password. But last year the Economic Development Administration (EDA) took IT problems to a whole different level.

The agency racked up a $2.7 million bill in response to a potential malware infection, according to Federal News Radio’s look into a Department of Commerce audit.

In December 2011, Homeland Security notified both the EDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about the potential malware infection. While NOAA cleaned it up in a few weeks, the EDA recruited outside security contractors and destroyed desktops, printers, cameras, mice — pretty much everything you’d have on your desk. The EDA burned through almost half its IT budget for a malware problem that “barely happened” — what was found was characterized as pretty common.

What the audit indicated was that the “EDA’s IT infrastructure was so badly managed and insecure that no attacker would need sophisticated attacks to compromise the agency’s systems,” according to the tech publication ars technica.

I bring this up not because that $2.7 million could have been spent on economic development on Chicago’s South Side — it was the IT budget, not grant money — but to point out the red tape and hideous management within some of our governmental agencies. If the IT department can’t handle a simple virus, what does that mean for more complex problems like the economy and unemployment?

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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Tags: economic developmentequity factor

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