UPDATE: Charles Cooper over on CNET was granted a quick interview yesterday with Tiversa co-founder and CTO Sam Hopkins.

Tiversa, a company whose business is to know P2P has discovered a security breach concerning the Marine 1 helicopter that President Obama flies in. According to the the report via WPXI as well as CNET, it appears that someone had a P2P sharing program on their computer.

Per a snippet of the WPXI article:

Tiversa also found sensitive financial information about the cost of the helicopter on that same computer.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, an adviser to Tiversa, said, “We found where this information came from. We know exactly what computer it came from. I’m sure that person is embarrassed and may even lose their job, but we know where it came from and we know where it went.”

Here is the first issue – Why was a government contractor not trained to know that having LimeWire or BearShare on a computer with sensitive planned engineering upgrades, avionic schematics, and computer network information is a big no-no? Secondly, and even more important – What pirated music or movies is that important to have during work hours and from Iran?

I personally do not buy the “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.” statement as pointed out by the below WPXI quote.

Boback said someone from the company most likely downloaded a file-sharing program, typically used to exchange music, not realizing the potential problems.

First off, when you are a government contractor or employee of the government, you have training (or should have had training; apparently maybe they need to do all hands re-training now?) on what is allowed and what isn’t. This one is common sense, but I can see where someone may have thought that it would be faster downloading all the pirated music and movies while at work via the higher speed networks than waiting until they were home on their own personal computer. I can see this, but at the same time can’t believe they had to have the music or movies that badly and at work.

As of now, the above seems to be the only information we currently have on this. Until more information is out there, if I were President Obama, I think I would take ground transportation until the total security of Marine 1 can be accounted for – bolt by bolt, screw by screw, and wire by wire. Sorry if that sounds like someone has a long few days ahead of them, but we can’t be too complacent about the security of the President of the United States.

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