Hardware, not hackers, behind US Postal Service's computer woes
The United States Postal Service had a little trouble installing some hardware yesterday, and now it's feeling the burn - the service's email system remains on the fritz while "some services offered at retail offices" have been affected to boot. Here's what you need to know: The USPS has battled snow and rain and heat and gloom of night, and a systems outage like this hasn't really slowed it down any. Mail deliveries are continuing as usual, as are mail scanning and processing procedures so your letters are currently flowing through their tubes same as always.
On the upside, the USPS was relatively quick to confirm that the outage wasn't actually caused by a cadre of networking ne'er-do-wells (or anything more objectively sinister). That's especially good news for some 800,000 Postal Service employees whose sensitive personal information was exposed by hackers last November - the last thing they need is more potential aggravation. Security analysts were quick to attribute the attack to the Chinese government, but officials were loathe to speak to tell Washington Post about who might've really been behind it. Still. Between that and the uptick we've seen in cyberattacks over the past few months, it's just a little heartening to see that the USPS's infrastructure headaches are least its own fault this time.
