Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Fight New Leaks
Amid international panic over WikiLeaks' recent leak of confidential United States embassy cables, the U.S. military has ordered its troops to stop using all forms of removable media CDs, DVDs and thumb drives included or risk a court-martial.
As reported on Wired today, a Dec. 3 "Cyber Control Order" issued by Maj. Gen. Richard Webber, commander of Air Force Network Operations, mandates that troops "immediately cease use of removable media on all systems, servers, and stand alone machines residing on SIPRNET," the Defense Departmentâ??s secret network.
Banning all data transfers from classified networks is the military's attempt to prevent another mass security breach similar to the one that led to the WikiLeaks document leak. In late May, Pfc. Bradley Manning was arrested after it was discovered he had downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from SIPRNET onto a CD marked Lady Gaga before handing them to WikiLeaks.
The military order comes at the end of a busy week of WikiLeaks-related incidents . Yesterday (Dec. 9), a Dutch teenager was arrested for denial-of-service attacks levied on the websites of Amazon, MasterCard and Visa for their refusal to do business with WikiLeaks.
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