March 1st, 2009
Marine One details leaked from P2P net
A company that monitors P2P networks says it found details about the president’s helicopter, Marine One, on a computer in Tehran. Pittsburgh station WPXI reports.
Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, said, ”We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One. … 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,” Boback said.
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, an adviser to Tiversa, added:
We found where this information came from. We know exactly what computer it came from. 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.
It’s no accident the information wound up in Iran, the company said. Countries like Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Qatar and China are “actively searching for information that is disclosed in this fashion because it is a great source of intelligence,” Boback said.
Rep. Jason Altmire said he will ask Congress to investigate the risk to national security of this sort of exposure.
Cnet’s Charles Cooper interviewed the Tiversa’s Sam Hopkins (Cooper says he’s the CEO but the original report said Boback is CEO; the company website doesn’t list executives), who said someone at the company was running a Gnutella client - possible a buggy one.
Hopkins said it’s hardly an unusual occurence - although presumably the usual breaches aren’t so closely connected to the President.
Everybody uses (P2P). Everybody. We see classified information leaking all the time. When the Iraq war got started, we knew what U.S. troops were doing because G.I.’s who wanted to listen to music would install software on secure computers and it got compromised. … We see information flying out there to Iran, China, Syria, Qatar–you name it. There’s so much out there that sometimes we can’t keep up with it.
Bottom line: P2P is the biggest disaster for security “of all time.”
We’ve had people come into our data center and we’ve shown them things that are out there on P2P and they go away with their minds blown.
