Fergie's Tech Blog

Virus Casues Japanese Classified Data 'Go Online'

A UPI newswire article, via PhysOrg.com, reports that:

File-share can be a dangerous business, or so Japanese government agencies are finding out the hard way.

Two weeks after the country's Maritime Self-Defense Force found out that some highly classified information had been posted on the World Wide Web for all to read as a result of a programming error in its file-sharing Winny system, a slew of other agencies are finding similar problems.

Winny itself is a peer-to-peer file-sharing program that has been charged with violating copyright laws in Japan. It has, however, proved to be popular with much of the population because of its cheap cost and user-friendly format, many of whom have installed the software onto their own personal computers, including bureaucrats. But the use of their personal computers for official business has proved to be particularly hazardous when dealing with government data.

Some of the information from the defense force that was posted onto the Internet included warfare training information and call signals. They had found their way into cyberspace after a force member used his personal computer to input the classified data, which then got infected by a computer virus.

posted by Fergie @ 3/09/2006 09:04:00 PM