Classified data on president's helicopter leaked via P2P

Classified information about the communications, navigation and management electronics on Marine One, the helicopter now used by President Barack Obama, were reportedly discovered in a publicly available shared folder on a computer in Tehran, Iran after apparently being accidentally leaked over a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network last summer.

The classified file appears to have been leaked from a computer belonging to a Bethesda, Md. military contractor and was discovered Thursday by Tiversa Inc. a Cranberry Township, Penn. P2P monitoring services provider. P2P networks are widely used to share music, video and data files over the Internet.

The Iranian IP address at which the file was found belongs to an "information concentrator" -- someone who searches P2P networks for sensitive information, said Chris Gormley, chief operating officer at Tiversa. The location at which the file was found included several other documents with classified and sensitive military information which were also leaked over file-sharing networks, Gormley said He did not disclose what the other documents were.

According to Gormley, Tiversa first found information about Marine One's avionics floating around on file-sharing networks last summer and notified the contractor and the authorities about the discovery. Last week's search shows that copies of the document are still available on P2P networks to anyone who knows how to look for it, he said.

This is not the first time that highly classified and sensitive information has been discovered on P2P networks. In July 2007, members of a Congressional subcommittee heard from a panel of security experts, including executives from Tiversa, about how they had found millions of classified documents on file-sharing networks. Among the examples cited were a diagram of the Pentagon's secret backbone network infrastructure, complete with IP addresses and password change scripts; contractor data on radio frequency manipulation used to defeat improvised explosive devices (IED) in Iraq; physical terrorism threat assessments for three major U.S cities; and information on five U.S. Department of Defense information security systems audits.

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