United States have banned P2P in Antarctica sites

Aug 19, 2009 12:05 GMT  ·  By
US Employees stationed in Antarctica will not have a rich Internet experience
   US Employees stationed in Antarctica will not have a rich Internet experience

United States Government officials have issued a letter to all United States Antarctic Program (USAP) employees, informing of a stricter application of the internal IT usage rules, regarding P2P and online gaming. Personnel stationed in any Antarctica-based  location owned and ran by the US will face penalties when caught using P2P connections or playing online games.

The letter was sent out as a security alert to all USAP employees by Dennis Gitt, director of Information Technology and Communications, on August 18th, 2009. Mr. Gitt warned about possible malware intrusions and hacker attacks, citing, from various online magazines, the recent cases that had plagued Government agencies.

The letter mentions recent data leaks of the Obama presidential safe houses, the first family's motorcade routes and several leaked documents that contained detailed locations of all the US nuclear facilities.

Mr. Gitt warned about possible infections with computer malware that could result in network infections, viruses that installed keystroke-capturing software and sent out captured data to third parties. He also put an emphasis on Internet bandwidth usage, stating that it “eats up a bunch of satellite bandwidth by downloading” illegal files.

Popular P2P pieces of software like KaZaa, LimeWire, BitTorrent and Gnutella were cited as unsecure applications that could lead to important data leaks. No details were given in the letter as to whether the US authorities would restrict these connections on their own, or if they would leave them in the good trust of their employees to stop using them.

The entire letter is presented, as taken from FreakBITS, below.

Information Security Awareness Monthly Topic: P2P, the USAP, and you

Imagine this scenario. A USAP participant on the Ice wants to get a copy of a popular new game. The user decides to download a copy from Morpheus, which another user has uploaded in the form of a ZIP file. The user eats up a bunch of satellite bandwidth by downloading this file. Then, he opens up the ZIP file and runs the Setup.exe program to install the game. However, the .exe file doesn’t invoke a setup routine. Instead, it’s a virus that starts propagating itself on the network. Or perhaps it installs the game, but it also secretly installs keystroke capturing software that e-mails keystrokes. Do those examples sound far-fetched? In fact, they are both very real threats to the USAP and to your personal information. From the USAP Enterprise Rules of Behavior, ‘Use of USAP information resources to participate in Internet-based gaming, peer to peer networking, or streaming media usage activities is prohibited.’ There are many different Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications: BitTorrent, Limewire, Gnutella, and KaZaa to name a few more popular ones. Some are used to download legitimate software and media, some illegitimate. None of them are permitted on the USAP enterprise network for both bandwidth and security concerns. P2P applications have the potential to overwhelm the internet connections on the Ice and inadvertently bring malicious software and traffic into the network. A recent article in ComputerWorld magazine included the following highlights. ‘Details about a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family — to be used in a national emergency — were found to have leaked out on a LimeWire file-sharing network recently.’ … Also unearthed on LimeWire networks in recent days were presidential motorcade routes and a sensitive but unclassified document listing details on every nuclear facility in the country.’ The leaks likely came from a White House employee’s computer that was running LimeWire to download music, and the software ended up sharing out lots of other documents that were on the user’s system. While no one on the USAP network should have presidential safe houses lists on their desktop, it shows how easily otherwise sensitive files can be made available to the P2P networks and the rest of the world. In short, while on the USAP network be sure to disable or uninstall P2P clients from your machine, or to be safe just never use them in the first place.

Dennis L Gitt Director, Information Technology and Communications