Details on Presidential Motorcades and Safe House for First Family Leak Via P2P
Details about a Secret Service safe house for the First Family -- to be used in a national emergency -- leaked on a LimeWire file-sharing network recently, members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were told today.
Wed, July 29, 2009
Computerworld — Details about a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family -- to be used in a national emergency -- were found to have leaked on a LimeWire file-sharing network recently, members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were told this morning.
Also unearthed on LimeWire networks in recent days were presidential motorcade routes and a sensitive but unclassified document listing details on every nuclear facility in the country, Robert Boback, CEO of Tiversa Inc. told committee members.
The disclosures prompted the chairman of the committee Rep. Edolphus Towns, (D-N.Y.), to call for a ban on the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) software on all government and contractor computers and networks. "For our sensitive government information, the risk is simply too great to ignore," said Towns who plans to introduce a bill to enforce just such a P2P ban.
Tiversa is a Cranberry Township, Pa.-based P2P monitoring services provider that in the past has served up dramatic examples of highly-sensitive information found on file-sharing networks. In January for instance, the company disclosed how it had discovered sensitive details about the President's helicopter, Marine One, on an Iranian computer after the document leaked over a P2P network.
Today's hearing continued in that vein, with Tiversa providing new sensational examples of leaked information. Boback showed off a document, apparently from a senior executive of a Fortune 500 company, listing every acquisition the company planned to make -- along with how much it was willing to pay. Also included in the document were still-private details about the company's financial performance. Boback also showed numerous documents listing Social Security numbers and other personal details on 24,000 thousand patients at a health care system and FBI files, including surveillance photos of an alleged Mafia hit man, leaked while he was on trial. He demonstrated to members of the committee how child predators troll file-sharing networking looking for images and data they could use.
Speaking with Computerworld before the hearing, Boback said that all of the information was readily available on LimeWire's file-sharing network after apparently being leaked. The data on the nuclear sites was found on computers associated with four IP addresses in France, though it is not immediately clear where the data came from. The files containing information about the president had Obama's seal on it and a July date.
Though the information was not classified, it was sensitive enough that under normal circumstances it would not have been available even with a Freedom of Information Act request, he said.
