Pentagon Confirms 2008 Computer Breach — 'Worst Ever'

jowifi writes "The New York Times reports that the Pentagon has confirmed that, in 2008, a foreign agent instigated 'the most significant breach of US military computers ever' using a USB flash drive. While the breach was previously reported on Wired and the LA Times, this is the first official confirmation of the attack that led to the banning of USB drives on government computers."

Comments

Where there's a USB port ... there's a way

[PolygamousRanchKid]

A US Army dental surgeon told me that their computers were "fixed", so they could not copy pictures of their operations to any external media. The surgeons needed anonymous pictures of operations that they had performed, for preparing for their careers after their service. Like, applying for a job somewhere.

One of them figured a way to use the USB port in the Canon printer that they had. They could toss pictures at the printer, and land them on the USB stick. Circumventing any blocks on the PCs from accessing the PCs' USB ports.

So any unprotected port is, well, a potential source of a leak.

Re:This is likely why MS has GPOs in W7

[Lehk228]

there should be a way to restrict execution to only code signed by the owning organization's IT security.