If you visit Washington, locals will point out when the President leaves in a convoy of helicopters, most of which are there to protect him from bad guys. It’s quite an inspiring sight. His helicopter is called Marine One.
But the helicopters are getting on in age, so there has been some discussion about an overpriced helicopter that was to be bought to replace the President’s aging Sikorsky Sea-King helicopters, that transport him to and from the airport.
Presumably, information and technical data of the new helicopter should be top secret, partly to stop “industrial espionage” (stealing the design by another company who can make it cheaper since they don’t have to do research) but also for security reasons. I presume an expert might spot a weak spot in the design and could use it to harm the President.
But now, it seems, the data on the new helicopter has been found on line in Tehran.
The strange thing is that the security “leak” was picked up in June by a security firm Tiversa.
From WPXI
In June, Tiversa said it warned the federal government that an IP address in Iran was searching for information.A few months later, Tiversa said they discovered the helicopter documents while searching file-sharing programs, but at that time they hadn’t been downloaded to Iran.Then last week, Tiversa discovered those same documents had been downloaded to the IP address in Iran.
That really makes me safe. The “copyright” police are right there threatening teenagers who “share” Brittany Spears music, but no one seemed to have been bothering to trace those who had downloaded the top secret helicopter information on their hard drives.
Apparently someone who had the plans on their hard drive also was using Limewire, a “P2P” software program that lets you share information over the web.
For example, if you want to download and listen to Matt Monroe’s “Born Free”, you simply install Limewire on your computer, and then do a search for “Matt Monroe” or “Born Free”. The search engine will search specific folders on the computers of everyone who is on line using the program until they find the song.
The problem?
When you install the program, it allows you to decide what folders contain files (songs, movies, porn) you want to share. If you are careless, you might accidentally “permit” downloads from folders that have personal information or files that you don’t want to share with others.
Apparently, that’s what happened here, and presumably the culprit was a defense contractor who had accidentally allowed Limewire to download information from a folder that contained the information about the helicopter.
So all the bad guys had to do is find the right file name, and voila: mission accomplished.
The older “Limewire” program, you didn’t even have to know the correct filename: it even allowed you to search all the permitted folders on someone’s computer. Let’s say you found a song by Matt Monroe to download. You could ask Limewire to search the open files of the guy who had that song on his computer, and voila, you can download his Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra songs too.
The leak has resulted in the Obama administration calling for a major overhaul in security for those who have access to top secret programs, which have been lax:
The US Government Accountability Office criticised the Department of Homeland Security last September for failing to “satisfy its cybersecurity responsibilities”, while a congressional panel warned in November that cyber-espionage efforts from China posed a growing economic and information security threat.
If your business has lost information via P2P, Tiversa has this checklist on how to handle the problem LINK.
Presumably, someone who allowed the program to float for several months on the Limewire P2p network without trying to stop it or check who had the information will be sent a nasty letter.
And finally, StrategyPage notes that the newer “bittorrent” type programs are safer from a security standpoint, since they don’t allow the “search my drive” option.
The best quote in this major security breach is this tongue in cheek comment from Gizmodo:
the leak happened because an employee…accidentally stored the files in a P2P folder… Before long, the files had been uploaded to ~~xOsamaFanIran74x~~ and the intelligence community fell into a tizzy, all because some guy wanted to catch up on Big Love during his lunch break.
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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the Philippines.Her website is Finest Kind Clinic and Fishmarket.
3 users commented in " The Spy game: CIA, KGB, and now: P2P "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackIn a situation of crime and security, it is usually good to follow the money while starting an investigation, Who gets to gain from the leaking of the Marine One specs.
1. Does Iran get to gain security advantage by having the specs of Marine One leaked.
2. Does someone else get to gain “another” type of advantage by having the specs of Marine One leaked.
Answer:
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…its easy to kill a dog by first giving it a bad name….
First and foremost,
At face value one would think that its true, that Iran was trying to obtain and utilise the security and design details of Marine One. On one hand one can deduce that Iran is trying to gain military leaverage by obtaining the military specs of Marine One.
Yet on the other hand, one starts to smell a rat when you realise the following:
1. it is not in the interest of Iran’s military ambition to bring about increased suspicion upon itself, attempting to get the details of the Marine One in itself would have been a stupid step at keeping under the radar.
2. The military industrial complex benefits financially whenever there is a war, security threat or rumour of war, hence the detail of the Marine One could easily have been planted in a way the would make the public perceive Iran as an iminent security threat to the President of the United States. Remember all evidences and investigations point to the fact that Neo-cons deceived Americans into going into a War with Iraq and Afghanistan by planting the false information that Taliban and Saddam had something to do with the 911 attack, despite the fact that evidences point to the contrary.
3. Neo-conservatives are a branch of the New World Order hence it is no suprise a lot of Geo-political Manipulation of the World and the America citizens is being done in other to bring about an establishment of their goals and plans through fear mongering.
4. Neo-conservatives are looking for every possible reason to go make the US go to war with Iran.
5. Military Industrial complex gains financial benefits from the security fall out of having to protect the president from a new security loophole that has been created as a result of the leaked security details of Marine One.
6. The President just recently scrapped the recent development of a “New Presidential Helicopter” (an undesirable loss of money to those who have already invested in the project), hence it is in the interest of those private investors if the President can be forced to continue the development and procurement of a new generation of Presidential Helicopters by making sure that the current Presidential Helicopter i.e. Marine One becomes a security risk by leaking its details to the visible perceived threat to the US (i.e. Iran in this case).
7. Iran is not really as sophisticated as Neo-Cons would want everyone to believe.
8. Marine One specifications could easily have been leaked to the Irans as a bait through which Neo-Cons would then have a reason to call Iran a security threat such that it would thus be easier to drum up support for a reason to attack Iran.
9. Linking the leaked details of Marine One to the Iranians is a good way for Neo-Cons to manipulate the American public into thinking that Iran poses a domestic and foreign security threat to the US, because they end up manipulating the public into thinking that Iran has developed the capability to strike at the Marine One Presidential Helicopter.
I hope the American public would resist being duped into allowing US to wage a military campaign against Iran and I hope the US would resist allowing the Military Industrial complex to manipulate the people into continue to fund programs the continue to enrich the Elites and Neo-cons while impoverishing the general public.
Secondly, everyone needs to realise that just P2P networks do not share information by itself, rather it is people that use P2P networks to share information. information being shared via P2P networks can both be good and bad, however that does not warrant labelling P2P networks as completely evil in itself. Also it is an open secret that Neo-cons and the New World Order have being doing everything possible to restrict the freedom of the internet and the American people, hence it is easy for them to also use the case of the leaked Marine One details to further introduce measures that further restrict the freedom of information and freedome of the internet.
Hence i also hope the american people would also resist this attempt at introducing further laws and controls that would ultimately further restrict the freedom of the american people.
Fine. Part out your family to the various ports which handle overseas trade. And while you are at it;
My point was not that Iran was “spying”, but that the carelessness of the US contractor left the specifications on his computer for any teenager to find.
Industrial spying is common, and of course there are manufacturers in Iran who would like the information to improve their products.
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