Friday, December 10, 2010

Déjà vu - Military Bans Removable Disks AGAIN

It's too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon's secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial.

More info is available at Military-bans-disks-threatens-courts-martials-to-stop-new-leaks

NOTE: Removable disks were disabled on military computers and networks two years ago. It proved to be impracticable because many military users of imagery and other critical data only have access to low speed networks or no network access at all. In some cases critical operational readiness and project executions were being negatively impacted so the policy was changed. Removable media could be temporarily enabled under controlled conditions if documented. So one of three things occurred that allowed the WikiLeaks: (1) the military agency had not implemented the control procedures, (2) the WikiLeaks perpetrator who burned the documents to CDs had the authority to enable removable disks on the classified network, or (3) the WikiLeaks perpetrator convinced someone to enable removable disks on the classified network. The bottom line is the WikiLeaks were caused by weak management controls over classified networks and data.

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