MoD's Error Leaks Secrets of UK Nuclear Submarine

Tasha26 writes "UK's Ministry of Defence admitted that secret information about its nuclear powered submarines was leaked on the internet by mistake. A 'technical error' (i.e. turning the background colour of certain text to black) meant that sensitive blacked-out parts of the online MoD report could be read by anyone who copy-pasted it into another document. This accidental leak reveals, among many other things, how easy it would be to cause a Fukushima-style reactor meltdown in a sub, and details of measures used by the US Navy to protect its own nuclear submarines."

Comments

Re:hahaha

[PhunkySchtuff]

It absolutely boggles my mind that this can still happen.

Adobe specifically have put in a redaction feature into Acrobat Pro just to do this, and it couldn't be easier to use.

You select the redaction tool and drag your mouse over the text to redact. Select as many pieces of text as you want, they're hilighted while you're doing it so you can see what you're doing.

Then, when you're done, click the Apply Redactions button and it's done.

Not only is the text on the page redacted, but any metadata (and there's often quite a bit in your average PDF) that could potentially leak important information is removed too. You now have a PDF that's safe to distribute and I'd wager that it's actually easier to do it this way than it would be to draw black rectangles over everything you want to hide.

Re:It's not the user's fault

[TubeSteak]

They are going to scan a bunch of written signatures and paste them in to the documents which are "signed". There will be a directory (sorry, "folder") full of signatures to choose from.

This is modded +5 funny, but it is tragically common in the medical and professional world.
A lot of doctor's offices are printing out pre-signed perscriptions on 8x11 instead of hand writing/signing on perscription pads whose paper has security features.