61 million reasons for secure collaborative working as major UK Climate Research Unit is hacked
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
21st November 2009 - Reports are coming in that the one of the UK's major Climate Research Unit (CRU) computer systems have been hacked and, says Cyber-Ark, the secure collaborative data sharing specialist, this is a classic casestudy for the reason why secure collaborative working systems exist.
"Details on this breaking story are still sketchy, but from what we know, around 61 megabytes of sensitive data were downloaded from the University of East Anglia's CRU servers and published on an anonymous FTP server in Russia," said Mark Fullbrook, Cyber-Ark's UK and Ireland director.
"It appears that the data stolen includes more than 1,000 emails and 70-odd documents that are highly contentious as regards the issue of global warming - something that various groups have alleged the governments of the world have kept a lid on for years," he added.
According to Fullbrook, it remains to be seen how explosive the data that has been stolen is, but unconfirmed reports suggest that the information is potentially embarrassing to several of the leading academics in the field of climate research in the UK and US.
What's interesting about the story, Fullbrook went on to say, is that the FTP link (http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip) is on a Russian server that the data thief has chosen carefully – apparently for fear that the data might be taken down, when the server owners realize the political dynamite it contains.
However, by lunchtime of Saturday, November 21, 2009 the link comes up with “Object not found” and servers such as Tiscali immediately redirect to their search page.
Regardless of what happens in the aftermath of the data breach, Fullbrook said it is a textbook case of why secure collaborative systems like Cyber-Ark''s Inter-Business Vault exist. The big question, the Cyber-Ark director noted, is why the University's CRU hadn't installed some form of security on the potentially explosive data held on its servers.
And, he explained, with references to the US government's apparently negative stance on climate warming - which former vice president Al Gore has been trying to publicise for years - the data leak could cause severe ructions on Capitol Hill.
"Once the political fall-out from this data breach incident has settled, questions will undoubtedly be asked by those in charge about why better IT security systems weren't installed on the University CRU's servers," he said.
"I find it astonishing that politically sensitive data like this wasn't kept under highly encrypted protection. This data leak has the potential to add weight to the climate change cause, as well as acting as a case study on the need for secure collaborative data working," he added.
For more on the University of East Anglia CRU data leak fiasco: http://preview.tinyurl.com/yhdua5w
Aside from the need for better security we are seeing here, however something much more important and that is that there are agencies out there, including so-called scientists, who will lie and cheat to get their way, whatever this may be in this case.
While there is a change in the climate and things are going haywire it would appear, however, from what the hackers have discovered, that a lot of the stuff we are being told, especially as to it all being man-made is in fact false.
If people were told the truth then we might be getting somewhere for we, the human race, has some impact on the changing climate and that through the destruction of the forests and not just the tropical rainforests.
The reason that we may have so much more CO2 on the atmosphere is not so much due to the burning of fossil fuel but of the fact that the forests, which absorb CO2, have been destroyed at a rate of knots ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
This hack came just in time, if one would like to be sarcastic, especially at this time when studies have found that more than half of the British people, for instance, do not believe that Climate Change is man-made.
Not surprising, in a way, seeing that one of our finest old environmental scientists, Professor David Bellamy, does not believe in it either in that way and has been, effectively, silenced by that conspiracy that just seems to have been unearthed by the hacker who cracked the server.
What are people to make of that?
© 2009
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