14 DAY TRIAL // During a hearing in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, P2P intelligence company Tiversa informed that the location of a Secret Service safe house, to serve the presidential family in case of emergency, had been leaked onto the Gnutella network. In response, Congressman Edolphus Towns, representing the 10th District of New York, has called for a ban of such software on the computer networks of government agencies and contractors.
Tiversa, headquartered near Pittsburgh, PA, is a company that specializes in searching peer-to-peer networks for leaked confidential information and investigating such incidents. According to Computerworld, during the Committee hearing, Tiversa's CEO, Robert Boback, revealed several leaks of sensitive data from both the public and the private sector.
Some of the files the company found on P2P networks contained details of nuclear facilities across the U.S., presidential motorcade routes, FBI surveillance photos of an alleged Mafia hitman, the SSNs and other personal details of over 24,000 patients, as well as confidential corporate data belonging to a Fortune 500 company.
The document detailing the location of the Secret Service safe house is said to have borne Obama's presidential seal and a July date. Boback explained that the file was obtained from Limewire, a P2P file-sharing application, which mainly uses the Gnutella network. Mark Gorton, chairman of Lime Group, the company developing LimeWire, was also present at the hearing and was criticized by Rep. Edolphus Towns, the committee's chairman, for not holding up to past assurances of the industry being able to regulate itself.
"Specific examples of recent LimeWire leaks range from appalling to shocking. As far as I am concerned, the days of self-regulation should be over for the file-sharing industry," Towns said. He also announced plans to introduce a bill to enforce a ban of P2P software on networks and computers that dealt with sensitive information.
"This is of course not the fault of LimeWire and there’s no reason why Mark Gorton, chairman of Lime Group, should have been lambasted at today’s hearing," Rik Ferguson, solutions architect at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, who raised the pertinent question of why such software was not banned earlier, thought. "Does this mean that government network admins do not have visibility over who is using rogue software on their networks?," he also asked.
This is not the first time when presidential records have been leaked over P2P. Back in January, we reported that Tiversa specialists had located detailed blueprints of Obama's helicopter, Marine One, being shared from a computer in Iran.