SharePoint isn't why Snowden breached the NSA -- lax security is

[bemildred]

I especially like the last suggestion: more encryption.

In what can be called nothing less than a clever use of well-planted deflection, the head of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, recently let loose that the NSA relies heavily on Microsoft SharePoint for its data sharing needs. Or, more accurately, he decided to namedrop on SharePoint to allude to a mistaken notion that the inherent use of SharePoint was the reason why the NSA got breached by Edward Snowden recently.

The information was first picked up by The Register after the General was caught making the admission at a recently broadcast cyber security forum (which can be viewed on YouTube in its entirety). He described of Snowden: "This leaker was a sysadmin who was trusted with moving the information to actually make sure that the right information was on the SharePoint servers that NSA Hawaii needed".

Further in, Gen Alexander went on to say how sysadmins have a "need" to use removable media for their day to day jobs. He also touched on the fact that there was a "break in trust and confidence" due to the Snowden incident, and the NSA is purportedly picking up the pieces and fixing the broken links in its internal security procedures.

The funny part about this entire charade is that this isn't the first major SharePoint incident the government has dealt with. Remember Bradley Manning and his massive document dump a few years back? His recent acquittal of the most damaging charges against him have him back in the news, but Wired Magazine reported back in 2011 that Manning used similar scraping scripts to rob the US Military of a comparable treasure trove of confidential information off SharePoint backbones.

http://betanews.com/2013/08/01/sharepoint-isnt-why-snowden-breached-the-nsa-lax-security-is/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed+-+bn+-+Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN

[pam4water]

1. Interesting.