Some people just shouldn’t work with computers…[Classified data leaks]

• Mike Norris

• May 7, 2009 9:55 am

Tweet

It is no secret that the U.S. Government is sorely behind on the times technologically speaking. Just make friends with a search engine for a few minutes and you can find article after article on poor government policies concerning technology, technological standards, or anything else tech related that I just can’t think of right now. The latest “leak” of information is actually a tad funny, though scary all at the same time. Yet again, it centers around people who aren’t exactly the greatest (mentally speaking) around computers.

The BTSecurity Research Centre, in collaboration with the University of Glamorgan in Wales, Edith Cowan University in Australia and Longwood University in the US purchased over 300 hard drives (which originated from UK, America, Germany, France and Australia), from online services such as eBay and Craiglist among others to scour over said drives and scrutinize every 1 and 0 in order to find any and all “dark secrets” that they could. Did they make out? You bet they did. Out of all 300 or so drives, a whopping 34% had personal, commercial, and even government info on them! Yikes. Guess the government approved IT team fell asleep on the job. What is even more amuzing/scary is that one of the hard drives contained the test launch procedures of Lockheed Martin’s THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defense system used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq. One drive form Austrailia had images of nursing home patients and their wounds, unencrypted, ready for the world to see. Another drive from France even contained confidential material including network data and security logs from the German Embassy in Paris. Again, while it is funny to read about other individuals and organizations technological incompitence, it is a scary issue. Just think for a minute what would happen if some of our deepest military secrets fell into the hands of Taliban fighters. It wouldn’t be so funny then, would it?

The researchers did note that many of the drives had basic forms of formatting done to them. However they didn’t encounter anything that was too terribly hard to crack or recover. Seriously?! You have military/government secrets, not to mention all kinds of other highly classified information such as social security numbers, bank account numbers, etc. and the best the original drive owners did was a basic reformat. Greeeaaat. So, the next time you pick up a used hard drive online, you never know, you might just have the answer in your hands as to whether the moon landing was real, who really shot JFK, and countless numbers of other highly debated government secrets. From here on out, if you decide to scrap your old drive, I suggest giving it a trip through a concrete barrier attached to a rocket loaded with napalm. *Maybe* then you can consider yourself safe. In all seriousness…make your hard drive like the picture above and then I think you can call it a day.

Source: Crunchgear, Daily Mail, Image Source