Just been thinking about the recent hacker breakin to the Pentagon's computers. The defense IT people are talking about banning the use of flash drives, CD's, DVD's and removable media of all types. Windows has the unpleasant habit of uploading code from removable media and executing it. This means you can infect a Windows computer by merely inserting a flash drive or a CD. The infecting code can do anything it likes, starting with sending the entire contents of the hard drive out over the Internet. Remember the infmaous Sony rootkit that infected the user's machine for meaning playing an audio CD on it.
The only way for DoD to keep anything secret on a computer, is use something other than Windows. Linux anyone? DoD could create it's own version. In fact, should this happen, they ought to offer it free to us civilians. "DoD Linux" would be a sure fire seller to anyone wanting to use computers and not give away everything on them to his competitors.
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