Hard Drive Sold On eBay Held U.S. Missile Defence System Secrets
May 7, 2009 by national
Filed under Incident Reports
Highly sensitive details of a US military missile air defence system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay.
The test launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq.
The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin – who designed and built the system.
That is a little more than scary! How many times has this happened before? Shouldn’t all hard drives (not the computer housing) that hold classified material be marked in some way so the IT guys know not to recycle? That’s a no brainer, right? Security dollars at work!