Wikileaks: How our Government IT Failed Us

ZDNet ^ | December 1, 2010 | Jason Perlow

[gitmo]

It wasn’t an insecure SIPRNet that created the “perfect storm” that allowed Private Bradley Manning to dump the State Department cables to Wikileaks. It was the failure of our government to apply standard IT practices in a theater of war.

>== snip ==

So if SIPRNet is secure, and with the NetTop 2 environment it’s impossible to copy data off to a USB flash drive or a DVD from a secure session, how the heck was Manning able to dump that data to Wikileaks?

== SNIP ==

But according to a Wired article from over the summer, we know exactly what went wrong:

As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level. The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”

“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”

==SNIP==

[TigerClaws]

Lady Gaga?

We should have asked. He would have told.

[La Lydia]

I am a bad person. I want to see that treasonous little $**t dead. Tried, convicted and executed.

[Uri’el-2012]

Well, the problem is that in this case, the US Army didn’t deploy NetTop 2 for the workstations that Private Manning had access to in Iraq. Instead, he had access to two laptops, with functional DVD writers which were directly connected to the SIPRNet and JWICS, not through secure, isolated virtual desktop sessions.

This resulted in a chink in the armor that was exposed to the wrong type of person — a mentally unstable, angry young 22-year old Army Private who had carte blanche capability to copy and suck down everything from SIPRNet and the JWICS that he could get his grubby little hands on.

Manning's Commanding Officer needs to be court-marshaled !

[FourPeas]

Having friends in IT Security, this isn’t surprising.

[JPII Be Not Afraid]

Two things come to mind when ever I think of this guy

1. Lee Harvey Oswald
2. The Net - Sandra Bullock

Somethings just not right.

[DTogo]

Just wait until your entire medical history is on a Big Govt Obamacare computer server.

A fruity PFC somewhere will safegurad it...

[FlyingEagle]

One pissed off gay soldier did the espionage, and now Gates wants all the soldiers to be gay.

[UCANSEE2]

and now Gates wants all the soldiers to be gay

Well, from the Gates's point of view, that does solve the DADT problem.