MoD's Error Leaks Secrets of UK Nuclear Submarine 248
Tasha26 writes "UK's Ministry of Defence admitted that secret information about its nuclear powered submarines was leaked on the internet by mistake. A 'technical error' (i.e. turning the background colour of certain text to black) meant that sensitive blacked-out parts of the online MoD report could be read by anyone who copy-pasted it into another document. This accidental leak reveals, among many other things, how easy it would be to cause a Fukushima-style reactor meltdown in a sub, and details of measures used by the US Navy to protect its own nuclear submarines."
Daily Star? (Score:5, Informative)
On another note, why in the name of fuck is Slashdot posting anything from the Daily Star? The newspaper is most famous for its page-3 topless girls and their sheer determination to use words with as few syllables as possible.
Have a look at the website, the topics along the top, they've got an entire section dedicated to "Babes" and what's more the bottom of the article has the words "More 'News' Here". That's right, not even the website itself genuinely believes that it has real news there, instead opting to put the term in quotes.
Seriously...the daily star? Is this what slashdot has come to?
the actual news (Score:5, Informative)
DO NOT look at the Star newspaper it's like looking at the national inquirer....
the people who broke the news where UK channel 4
see this link for the story
http://www.channel4.com/news/britains-nuclear-subs-potentially-vulnerable-to-accidents [channel4.com]
the document seems flattened but is here
http://robedwards.typepad.com/files/declassified-report-to-mod-defence-board.pdf/a [typepad.com]
anyone actually able to copy and paste from it ?
why does the MOD use microsoft word for these type of things is beyond me...
regards
John Jones
p.s. do you think china et. al. have the same problems...
Re:Daily Star? (Score:4, Informative)
On another note, why in the name of fuck is Slashdot posting anything from the Daily Star? The newspaper is most famous for its page-3 topless girls and their sheer determination to use words with as few syllables as possible.
So what if they have pictures of totty in their pages, that is not what is being linked to. The Daily Star do not seem to have made the story up, the write up seems as good as you get anywhere else. It appears that the Daily Star alterted the MOD about their stupidity so they are the origin of the story & deserve credit for that.
If you are such an intellectual snob that you won't read the Daily Star, here is the story on the BBC [bbc.co.uk].
Better BBC link (Score:2, Informative)
The Daily Star doesn't cost very much in the UK because they don't need to pay for clothes for some of the models.
Here's the BBC link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13107413.
Apparently something to do with blacking out parts of a report but the text still being there when you paste it into another document.
RTFD (Score:4, Informative)
Have you actually LOOKED at the document?
Its original classification was "RESTRICTED - UK EYES ONLY" which is basically a rather quaint old fashioned form of "UK RESTRICTED".
RESTRICTED is the lowest level that requires any special handling to speak of. We would tend to assume that foreign intelligence agencies already have everything that is RESTRICTED.
CONFIDENTIAL is the lowest level at which any serious effort is taken to prevent FISs getting hold of the information, and then exponentially more protective measures are taken as one moves through SECRET and TOP SECRET.
So whilst embarrassing, it doesn't contain anything that any halfway competent FIS would not have already been aware.
Move on, nothing to see here....
Re:hahaha (Score:5, Informative)
It absolutely boggles my mind that this can still happen.
Adobe specifically have put in a redaction feature into Acrobat Pro just to do this, and it couldn't be easier to use.
You select the redaction tool and drag your mouse over the text to redact. Select as many pieces of text as you want, they're hilighted while you're doing it so you can see what you're doing.
Then, when you're done, click the Apply Redactions button and it's done.
Not only is the text on the page redacted, but any metadata (and there's often quite a bit in your average PDF) that could potentially leak important information is removed too. You now have a PDF that's safe to distribute and I'd wager that it's actually easier to do it this way than it would be to draw black rectangles over everything you want to hide.
Re:It's not the user's fault (Score:5, Informative)
They are going to scan a bunch of written signatures and paste them in to the documents which are "signed". There will be a directory (sorry, "folder") full of signatures to choose from.
This is modded +5 funny, but it is tragically common in the medical and professional world.
A lot of doctor's offices are printing out pre-signed perscriptions on 8x11 instead of hand writing/signing on perscription pads whose paper has security features.