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Air Force Emails Sensitive Information to Tourism Site
Khuffie writes "The US Air Force has been sending sensitive information, including flight plans for Air Force One, to a website promoting the town of Mildenhall in Suffolk. When told of the error by the site's owner, the Air Force did not attempt to fix it at first. When reminded at a later time, instead of fixing the issue, they advised the owner to 'block unrecognizable addresses from his domain and have an auto-reply sent reminding people of the official Mildenhall domain and blocked his website from access on base.'"
...because it's always someone elses problem.
quickly signs up for:
colonelblimp@area51.com
thechief@whitehouse.gov
maninred_onthegate@certaindeath.com
admin@guam.com
fatgord@no10.co.uk
binladen@caves_r_us.pak
just to see what comes my way
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
Isn't the Airforce the branch that has been tasked with Cyberspace security? Some kind of Cyber Command? Military Intelligence at its highest magnitude.
It's the only way to neutralise the tourist threat!
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
It's almost as if they WANT someone to kill the president....
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I see from TFA that the owner finally took his site off-line because of the problem. So the USAF probably considers the problem solved. Another triumph for American diplomacy.
It was only after sensitive information had leaked that anything was done about it.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
The Vice president accidentally shoots a man in the face, and it's the mans fault for getting in the way of the buckshot. The Air Force emails sensitive information to a website owner, and it's the site owner's fault for receiving it.
The Cheney Effect is spreading!
This from the mighty mighty Air Force which banned blogs, which accidentally flew nukes cross-country, which wants to start a "Cyber-Command." Not trying to flame, but why do they insult their own intelligence by banning the viewing of blogs while allowing this sort of crap to happen?
If the Air Force is sending that info over unencrypted e-mail, they have bigger problems than just the e-mail going to the wrong domain.
This kind of makes me suspicious that he article might just be hyperbole.
I wonder if taking down the website will stop the emails from coming?
Nope, I dont think so.
'block unrecognizable addresses from his domain'
isn't it more effective if air force domain names are removed from world wide dns ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
I spent 20 years in the Air Force. All DOD domains end in .mil not .com. We only have this persons word, didn't see one example. Flight plans via email. Crap! the DOD uses a device called KG-58 its an encryption device. The key is sent via courier every month. That is the only approved way to send any sensitive information.
"It had the notice 'Destroy by any means to prevent capture'," Right, that's absolute crap. One that is not the correct wording. Two its an electronic message, its on your hard drive. Did his computer explode after reading it? I'm sure there are idiots who sent things to his domain. But these just could not be official communications. There are way too many safeguards in place.
People from government ministry of finance offices in African Nations are always send me stuff too.
Lets see some real proof!
I think that this may have to do with bravado, but more likely it has to do with plain old ignorance. I seriously doubt the Airforce has good IT personnel. Maybe I'm being an IT snob, but from what I've heard from family members that work in government and other civil service (one is pretty highly ranked) is that (as we all know) woefully behind the times. I suspect that an email about data being sent to a public URL may have been seen as cryptic to whatever administrator ended up with the information. On a different thread I was talking about identify theft and how the government is one of the largest areas where proprietary data is stolen from. I think that it's just another symptom of a much more systemic problem within government agencies in the US.
--cally
--Cally
I was bothered by the Air Force's casual response to this problem as well. Not to mention their mistreatment of the domain owner, telling him to rewrite his 550 SMTP reply to inform senders of the base's domain. Why didn't a "Communications Squadron" offer to work with the domain owner to resolve these problems? The fact that the USAF shrugged off this rather simple problem onto the domain owner tends to confirm your suspicions about the quality of their IT services.
I love how I have to read other country's news reports to find out what's going on in my own country...
Dear Media Agency,
It has come to the attention of the Air Force that it is likely your e-mail servers may have inadvertently received confidential Air Force e-mails. These e-mails were sent in error. We beg and plead with you to not consider this a "leak" to your organization. These "leaks" will arrive to you though regular channels. As you may have received several thousand e-mails we ask that you forget everything that you read and delete everything. If you print a story about this and decide to publish some example e-mails, please contact us as we will help you find some really juicy e-mails. Again, we did not do this on purpose.
Since our e-mail servers are already having some serious problems, if you are not the intended recipient, please discard this e-mail immediately. We do not have any serious problems with our e-mail servers. If this is the tourism site again, please redirect these e-mails to major news organizations - and then delete.
Thank you,
US Air Force
We fuck up more before 8 a.m than most people fuck up all day.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes. Or, they could not send sensitive information via email.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I laugh because this concerns little emails.
When I lived in the small Wiltshire village of Mildenhall, we often had convoys of military vehicles being misdelivered.
"Where's the air base?" the lead driver would ask.
"150 miles North East of here!" we'd all reply.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
From 2001 to 2005, CIBC, a large Canadian bank sent faxes containing customers' fund transfer requests to a West Virginia scrapyard. The faxes didn't stop until the bank was publicly embarrased in the national media.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
I was in the US Air Force for 12 years, and and have now been in private industry for about the same, and I can tell you the USAF is reflective of all organizations. It makes mistakes like all others, exceeds standards in a lot, and at the end of the day gets the job done using the resources allotted to it. If there is low hanging fruit there, it is generally no more or less than anywhere else.
no comment
is still an oxymoron.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Who among us would be happy to have Dick Cheney as president?
You understand what a low-hanging fruit is, right?
It's no reflection on the quality or caliber of people and projects in the AF.
When your goal is to pick fruit from a tree, the low-hanging ones are the easiest to reach and thus the first to get picked.
When your goal is to cut costs, the low-hanging fruit are the ones that are easy to cut because they are 1) big-ticket items where a small reduction in qty yields a large cost-savings and 2) there is little direct elimination of jobs.
Naval yards, for example, fulfill item 1 but not item 2. Orders for new aircraft, however, fulfill both -- though there is indirect job loss.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
There *could* be a *WO*man in the office someday.
Personally, when I was in uniform and when I was taken in hand for criticizing a sitting president (84-88, and this happened around 86) I was told (or probably given an implied order) to RESPECT THE MAN IN OFFICE. To hell with that. If an idiot or dunce is in office, call a spade a spade. But, if fools someday (or in the past) take/took office, it would be tragic to not challenge that. I take GREAT offence at being told to unwaveringly GIVE my support for *the president*. If ANY president kills for power or destabilizes governments for control and so on, and tries to assign to that act my name... well, screw that, and SCREW HIM/HER. I have a bigger world view, and it doesn't allow for individual countries to call the shots for all the rest. EVER.
Well, unless you're in Russia. But, hey, even in Russia today, SOME permission is allowed to criticize the government. It just might not get printed.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Besides, these emails should have been going over SIPR (secret military VPN), not NIPR (public Internet). The SIPR machines can't route email to NIPR networks, so the problem never would've happened in the first place if proper OPSEC had been followed. Someone needs an Article 15 for this.
(I'm a former IT1 in the Navy, and worked with Air Force guys in Operation Northern Watch, and I can state that all of the Air Force personnel I worked with in the comms section were highly skilled professionals, so this is not a slam on Air Force-types in general.)
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.