Ministry of Defense Loses Laptops

The Ministry of Defense has admitted to losing around 100 USB memory sticks some of which contained ’secret’ or ‘restricted’ information and has had 658 laptops stolen since 2004.

The loss was described as embarrassing as apparently the MoD had little idea as to how and when they had been stolen. An MoD spokesman said “Any loss of data is investigated full” following on with “MoD policies procedures are generally fit for purpose”.

I couldn’t possibly speak for everyone but a department such as the MoD which is responsible for overseeing the defence of the entire United Kingdom, I would want their policies and procedures to be more than ‘generally‘ fit for purpose.

Since the report the MoD has recalled 20,000 non-encrypted laptops for encryption and those unable to be encrypted are to be removed from service. I only hope they are not using something as simple as BitLocker drive encryption, which has been show to be susceptible to attack.

Chinese Honeytrap

Yesterdays Mail on Sunday ran with an article on the front page detailing a honeytrap suspected to have been carried out by Chinese spy’s.

According to the report a top aide of the current British prime minister Gordon Brown had has Blackberry stolen whilst on an official tour of china earlier this year.

The unnamed aide was ‘picked up’ by a Chinese woman in a shanghai hotel and returned to his room with her, only to awake the next morning and seemingly without his trusty mobile device.

Had it been a regular mobile device this story wouldn’t be nearly as interesting but the blackberry is often touted for its office features such as document viewing and email access. Such a device would make an interesting target for any foreign intelligence agency. An article here goes on further to state that the Blackberry was password protected though not encrypted. I would take this to mean that in the hands of the Chinese government a mere password protection is essentially no protection.

China has since denied the allegation stating “The related report is a sheer fabrication. We hope that in the future, there will be no more such irresponsible reports”.

Personally I hold little doubt that it was Chinese intelligence gathering. No doubt this certainly will not be the last Chinese spy story any time soon as the Olympic games offers a veritable feast of spying opportunity’s for the red army.

Welcome

Well after a couple of attempts at maintaining a blog they have all failed miserably. Not only where they dull to read at best but painful to write. I soon realised that unless I chose something that really got me excited to write about, my foray into the blogosphere was doomed.

I realised is that a lot of people seem to blog about subjects they work in for me this is not an option. Whilst I will happily configure your servers and workstations for a salary, documenting the procedures does little to pique my interest. No no no I would rather take the bold foolish step of beginning a blog on something I in fact know very little about. In fact it is something most of us know very little about and that is because we are not supposed to know. It is what you might say is on a need to know basis… and you do not need to know.

It is spying. It is espionage and it is intelligence. I use all of these terms not so as to be vague but because all of them light up a specific region of my brain sending the neurons into a frenzy of excitement, the well documented ‘ZOMG! this is so awesome!’ area of the brain. This is what makes me want to blog.

P.S. if you know any sites that have news you feel worthy of a mention please post links in the comments. I look forward to reading them.