Utah State technology workers have apparently had their hands full the last few days dealing with people cracking the State's network. Here's a short blurb from the Deseret News and here's a different one from KSL. Apparently the attacks have been going on since 9/11. The State says that their systems are well protected, but its nearly impossible in a system as large and uncoordinated as the State's network to batten down every hatch. For example, there are all kinds of computers with public IP numbers simply sitting under people's desks. Likely as not, these systems are running operating systems that haven't been patched in years. The sole protection in this kind of scenario is firewalls and intrusion detection. What we have is a classic battle between security and local control. The State's been lucky and not had many serious attacks; consequently local control has won out so far.