Web Insecurity

Japanese Nuclear Secrets Hit the Web

July 25th, 2005

Approximately 40Megs of confidental data was leaked from a Japanese power planet when a worker became infected with a worm on his home PC. It seems that the worm used the Winny peer to peer file transfer client (popular in Japan) to transfer the files around the globe.

This leak should get companies to consider there own security policies. An employee should not be able to transport data to his home on a laptop or other storage device such as a usb thumbdrive or CD-RW. If a company fails to enforce a tight security policy, things like this will happen time and time again. This time, the information did not deal directly with radioactive substances but in the future, worse things could be leaked.

What if the worm were to steal usernames and passwords for critical databases or web servers? What if the documents stolen allowed terrorists or criminals to intercept radioactive waste? Things will continue to get a lot worse if companies do not create and enforce strong security policy.

Entry Filed under: Virus/Worms