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November 21, 2008
Worm Drives Military to Ban Removable Storage
“The Defense Department’s geeks are spooked by a rapidly spreading worm crawling across their networks. So they’ve suspended the use of so-called thumb drives, CDs, flash media cards, and all other removable data storage devices from their nets, to try to keep the worm from multiplying any further.
“The ban comes from the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, according to an internal Army e-mail. It applies to both the secret SIPR and unclassified NIPR nets. The suspension, which includes everything from external hard drives to ‘floppy disks,’ is supposed to take effect ‘immediately.’ Similar notices went out to the other military services.
“In some organizations, the ban would be only a minor inconvenience. But the military relies heavily on such drives to store information. Bandwidth is often scarce out in the field. Networks are often considered unreliable. Takeaway storage is used constantly as a substitute.
I had the pleasure of serving as an Information Systems Security NCO (ISSNCO) while I was stationed at Ft. Bragg. The only thing surprising about this particular article to me is that it’s happening now. The amount of crap people drug back and forth between their laptops and their home computers was astounding.
On the other hand, back when I was worrying about what people were up to on their laptops echelons below battalion were seldom even allowed to have a live Internet connection of any sort. When the CO wanted a networked printer, we ended up buying some bizarre $89 collection of parallel port dongles that connected to each other with telephone wire and “networked” with a printer by sending each other little “I’m using the printer!” signals.
(Link)
Posted by mhall at 4:50 PM | Add Comment
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