As the furor over thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables intercepted and spread to news organizations by WikiLeaks continues, the corporate IT world is surely looking inward for lessons to be learned.
The site was accessible again on Tuesday, reportedly going through a rented server in the U.S. after it came under apparent attack from hackers who blocked it in the U.S. and Europe.
‘Attack on International Community’
Former President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weighed in on the fallout Monday.
In a webcast discussion with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Bush said “leaks are very damaging, and people who leak ought to be prosecuted.” And Clinton said the disclosure of documents by WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange in 2006 and owned by the Sunshine Press, “is not just an attack on America’s foreign-policy interests [but] an attack on the international community — the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations, that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity,” according to USA Today.
The Obama administration has ordered a review of all government communication procedures and vowed to prosecute anyone who leaks classified information.
But what can private IT teams do to safeguard their internally classified information from some future corporate WikiLeaks?
Not much, according to Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity school in Bethesda, Md.
“You cannot simply say ‘Don’t trust the users,'” Paller said. “I suppose the best advice is that data-leakage and data-transfer monitoring is worth the money — much like a security camera — to raise the chance that a thief could get caught.”
Guard Your PDFs
Charles King, principal analyst of Pund-It, said the real lesson of WikiLeaks, which exposed thousands of documents on the wars in Iran and Afghanistan last summer in the biggest security breach in U.S. history before this month’s diplomatic cable release,…