The P2P Police
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Sometimes you just have to laugh, although I am guessing this cop is not doing an impression of the laughing policeman right now. The cause of this mirth is actually quite a serious matter, of course: the distribution of confidential police data via P2P software.
According to Graham Cluley at Sophos a Japanese policeman working at the Metropolitan Police Department in Tokyo, had installed the Winny file-sharing software on his work PC.
The Law (Part One) - don’t allow P2P software to be installed on your network.
What he didn’t realise was that while, one has to assume, he was happily downloading dodgy software, movies and music, the software was happily making some 6600 police documents relating to 12,000 people available to anyone who wanted to download them.
The Law (Part Two) - don’t think that sensible users are sensible enough to make IT security decisions, they are not.
This particular sensible policeman managed, with a little help from the P2P software, reveal the secret locations of automatic licence plate readers, names and addresses of members of the Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza gang, and numerous statements from victims of crime. “It’s no surprise that the Japanese police force has taken a hard line against this officer for disobeying advice about not running P2P file-sharing software on his PC - the authorities have been trying to enforce a ban following a number of similar embarrassing incidents in the past,” Graham Cluley told me.
The Law (Part Three) - don’t rely upon advice and education, users need to be tamed through application control.
Interestingly, a survey by Sophos last year showed that 86.5 percent of system admins wanted the opportunity to block P2P applications, and 79 percent went as far as to say that blocking is essential.
The Law (Part Four) - listen to your sysadmin, director type people, they tend to know what they are talking about.
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