Obama Helicopter Security Breached By File Sharing

Hugh Pickens writes "A company that monitors peer-to-peer file-sharing networks has discovered a potentially serious security breach involving President Barack Obama's helicopter. 'We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One, which is the president's helicopter,' says Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, a security company that specializes in peer-to-peer technology. Tiversa was able to track the file, discovered at an IP address in Tehran, Iran, back to its original source. 'What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,' says Boback, adding that someone from the company most likely downloaded a file-sharing program, typically used to exchange music, without realizing the potential problems. 'I'm sure that person is embarrassed and may even lose their job, but we know where it came from and we know where it went.' Iran is not the only country that appears to be accessing this type of information through file-sharing programs. 'We've noticed it out of Pakistan, Yemen, Qatar and China. They are actively searching for information that is disclosed in this fashion because it is a great source of intelligence.'"

Comments

Re:"windows" article tag biased

[MMC Monster]

The point is that the file sharing application is not run with the permissions of the current user, and therefore doesn't have access to information that isn't a+r.

That being said, file sharing applications are supposed to share files. Running these applications as a separate account with no access to files (and likely inability to have write access to the user's home directory or a subdirectery thereof) is quite brain dead.

Any power user that wishes to set up the application that way once it is installed can likely also change the folders that are shared to something reasonable.

Remember that the programmer has to account for some users having no idea which files they want to share.

Re:Cue the Hysteria...

[darkpixel2k]

The poster implied that that using something other than Windows would have been better. I posit that this particular user would have screwed the pooch no matter what OS they were on. This was not a built-in vulnerability of Windows (of which there are many). This was a built-in vulnerability of being an idiot user.

Bah! I'd bet if they were using something like MS-DOS, or even a BSD variant, it never would have happened.

The user--who is obviously a moron (installed filesharing software at work on classified computers), probably wouldn't be able to install filesharing software on *BSD, and they sure as hell wouldn't be able to find software for MS-DOS.

So yeah--BSD is more secure that Windows--especially when dealing with retards.