Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff/Flickr

Friends and foes, foreign born and homegrown, regularly try to breach the tight security that surrounds an American president. No barrier is too big, or technological hindrance too intimidating, to stop concerted attempts to access the president and his data. While the risks of getting caught are huge, the rewards for success are immense.

To get the goods—whether snapping a selfie, scoring state secrets, or taking a potshot—the determined go to extremes to climb fences, get across gates, and search for technological backdoors. Most disturbingly, the president sometimes ushers the ill-suited or ill-meaning through the front door and into the inner sanctum.

It’s time to close the windows, lock the doors, make new keys, and develop new protocols.

Clumsy spycraft and stupid excuses have revealed what could be China’s most recent and flagrant attempt to infiltrate the secure systems and locked-down technology surrounding the president of the United States in Palm Beach. If any intrepid intruder manages to insert a snuck-in malware-loaded thumb drive into a computer networked with the executive branch, data can then be corrupted and manipulated, making it unreliable. There is both the potential of irreparable system damage and of creating a steady flow of exfiltratable intelligence. In other words, it can gum up the works and also spit out a constant stream of information to bad guys.