Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability - Pick Any Two

Under Worm Assault, Military Bans Disks, USB Drives

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.

Its almost like we built out a bunch of systems and then connected them to huge networks without building security into the software or something.

Comments

[Marinus van Aswegen]

I'd really like to see more work on the information primitives. I really like what Parker did by extending the CIA model. I'm quite surprised that there's so little discussion / debate regarding merits of the Parkerian Hexed.