The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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Dirty Little Secrets
The Kazaa Crises
by James Dunnigan
February 16, 2005
Discussion Board on this DLS topic
File sharing networks, like Kazaa, are the source of much free music, movies, TV
shows and litigation. The are also the source of classified documents. The Dutch
Border Security service (Marechaussee) recently found secret documents of their
current investigations had been found on Kazaa. No surprise there. Kazaa works
by allowing any net users to automatically share files on their hard drive. You
use the Kazaa software on your PC to connect, and search everyone else’s hard
drives for files you are looking for. Most people are looking for copyright
violations (music and video files they would otherwise have to pay for.) The
security problem is that when many people set up the Kazaa software, they make
their entire hard drive available to the world, rather than just a few
directories containing music or movie files they want to share. Thus other
users, usually accidentally, discover files they didn’t expect to find. Some
less scrupulous people, knowing this sort of thing exists, go looking for files
that contain financial or other useful information.
The problem is
actually worse, and older than, the file sharing networks. When someone creates
a web site, and uses one of their computers as a server, it is not uncommon to
make files available to the Internet that are not meant to be available to
everyone. Again, unscrupulous people, with sufficient technical skills, go
looking for these files. The objective is often just curiosity, but
professionals are searching for data that can be turned into money, legally or
otherwise.
Cyberwarriors use this situation to constantly seek out
government, commercial or military hard drives that are vulnerable. The only
defense is to keep your local network off the Internet, which is what a lot of
intelligence agencies and military organizations do. But you can never be a
hundred percent secure. Someone is going to take work home with them, leave
sensitive files on their hard drive, then start using Kazaa…
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