Students buy US military secrets …
p2pnet news view Movies | P2P:- University of British Columbia journalism students investigating electronic waste uncovered a massive US security breach in a country listed as one of the top 10 sources of cybercrime.
When the Canadian students bought hard drives in an open-air market in Ghana for $C40, they found, “sensitive information about multimillion-dollar defence contracts between the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security and Northrop Grumman,” one of the largest military contractors in the US, says a UBC statement.
“We had the drives analysed after leaving Ghana and were surprised at what we found,” says UBC associate professor Peter Klein, a former 60 Minutes producer, who teaches the course.
“According to the students’ investigation, the FBI is concerned that companies such as Northrop Grumman may believe that their drives are wiped clean by software before being recycled,” says UBC, continuing »»»
Northrop Grumman has acknowledged it is looking into how its hardware and data ended up in Ghana.
“The reason the students discovered this security breach is that they took the time to go see for themselves what’s going on, without pre-conceived ideas of the story, and they did some amazing enterprise reporting,” says Klein, adding that students found credit card numbers and family photos on other hard drives.
Klein, one of three instructors teaching the course (including Canwest Global Visiting Professor Sarah Carter, CBS News Johannesburg Bureau Chief and Adjunct Professor Dan McKinney), says that a “parachute journalist” would not have found this story.
Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground is a pilot student production resulting from a $1-million donation by Vancouver venture philanthropist Alison Lawton of Mindset Innovation to UBC’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her gift launched Canada’s first International Reporting course to send journalism students abroad to cover important and under-reported issues. The gift will enable 10 students each year to travel and produce international journalism for major media outlets focusing on broadcast and online content.
Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground airs June 23 on PBS’ Frontline/World’s season finale.
(Cheers, Brit and Frank)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
UBC statement – UBC journalism students find sensitive US Homeland Security data in Ghana, June 22, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
June 24th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
And the reason people don’t perform the military grade deletion (delete + 3 times writing over same sectors) is because???
Some end users I can see not knowing how to do that, but companies should never trust another company with their sensitive information.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
So, is the FBI going to try and arrest the students and teachers for accessing sensitive military information?
June 24th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
@ Sukasa
If it does, George W. Harper will probably do all he can to help — the US.
Cheers!
June 24th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
“And the reason people don’t perform the military grade deletion (delete + 3 times writing over same sectors) is because???”
A single pass is enough to destroy any data on the drive for all practical purposes.
The myth that overwritten data can be recovered comes from a study one researcher did that used a clean drive, wrote data to it, then overwrote all the data with zeros. He then examined the bit patterns on the platter and was in some cases, able to determine whether that bit had been 1 or 0 before the wipe. However, this method requires dis-assembling the drive and examining the platter with equipment that costs at the very least, tens of thousand of dollars. Not only that, but doing so is extremely time consuming. Add to that the fact that if the particular section of the drive you’re looking at was ever written to more than once during normal use, it will be virtually impossible to determine the previous state of that bit.
In other words, you have to own a hugely expensive piece of equipment, take the drive apart, spend days or even months studying each individual bit and in the end, you may have recovered enough bits to spell out a single word.
Without taking the drive apart, you’re not going to be able to recover anything. Hard drives are designed to write one and only one copy of data to any given sector of the drive. When you ask the drive to read that sector back to you, it can only read the most recently written data. There is no secret command that tells the drive to tell you what was there before it was overwritten.
Don’t believe me? Format your drive, and I mean a FULL format, not just a quick erase. Then call up every data recovery service you can find, tell them that you performed a full or “low level” format on the drive and ask how much they’d charge to recover all your data. Make sure that you stress that the data was only overwritten ONCE. They’ll tell you that it’s imposisble.