UK military: iPod is security risk

[Jem'hadar]

UK military: iPod is security risk
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Music fans, beware: Britain's Ministry of Defence has become the latest organization to add the iPod to its list of high-tech security risks.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/interne...eut/index.html

[Ezri's Toy]

Makes sense to me. All an iPod is a portable hard drive and it can hold any file type. So, I wouldn't allow an iPod into a sensitive area either.

[Ergi]

But since the problem is plug and play storage devices in general USB sticks are affected by this ban as well, however those can quiet easily be concealed. So, will we all be searched for prohibited equiment at the workplace in the future?
And how far will those searches go?
I don't think they will achieve anything by this move. Everybody intending to transfer confidential information onto his iPod/whatever certainly wouldn't have told anybody that he had taken it to work. Connecting it to his work station would have aroused suspicion even without a formal ban.

[Balok]

It is so easy to steal data using any number of means that this seems like sticking a finger in the dyke. It looks proactive, but it amounts to little.

The effort is going to have to be made at the background check level, to catch people who are risks, and to suss out agents. And for some levels of projects, those checks will have to be repeated at irregular intervals to catch those who have been suborned.

It's the people you gotta watch. Not the tools. People make this mistake in all kinds of fields.

[Lt.Khrys Antos]

This seems normal to me.

I work on a floor without CD or floppy drives on a closed circuit data storage. Not allowed even cellphones inside, let alone iPods.

Checking people is fine. All security agencies do. There is one thing you need to worry about: People within the agency who will steal and sell your information to another group.

[Tobian]

Yeah I read this in the paper this morning. it seems fairly bone headed to me as to be honest if there is such an accute problem - lock the PC up in a cage and you can't get access to any port! Especially in the case of large military organisations which operate under strict protocols and have specific needs I am surprised that it is not operating on a dedicated specifically written OS - or a flavour of Unix... which don't exactly include up to the minute drivers for USBII or Firewire ports... letalone the actual hardware!!

Besides.... haven't these people seen Indipendance day? Don't they know that apple technology is alien invader compatible ? Surelly that would have been inscentive enough for them to not to put a handy applemac interface on their computer ? !

Seriously though, I seriously doubt that the computers ARE Apple Macs on base, so if they are using a flavour of Linux or Windows NT/2000/XP then it should be a very simple matter to tighten security and only allow ADMINISTRATORS access to driver installs. While it's not strictly true with USB storage devices I am fairly cetain you need the ipod service to be running on a PC for you to be able to access it at all!

...and especially with regards to our government institutions, I am highly surprised they are not running some ancient version of windows 3.1 still - which would make such an attempt laughable