Details on presidential motorcades, safe house for First Family, leak via P2P

Details about a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family - to be used in a national emergency - were found to have leaked on a LimeWire file-sharing network recently, members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were told this morning.

Also unearthed on LimeWire networks in recent days were presidential motorcade routes and a sensitive but unclassified document listing details on every nuclear facility in the country, Robert Boback, CEO of Tiversa Inc. told committee members.

The disclosures prompted the chairman of the committee Rep. Edolphus Towns, (D-N.Y.), to call for a ban on the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) software on all government and contractor computers and networks. "For our sensitive government information, the risk is simply too great to ignore," said Towns who plans to introduce a bill to enforce just such a P2P ban.

Tiversa is a Cranberry Township, Pa.-based P2P monitoring services provider that in the past has served up dramatic examples of highly-sensitive information found on file-sharing networks. In January for instance, the company disclosed how it had discovered sensitive details about the President's helicopter, Marine One, on an Iranian computer after the document leaked over a P2P network.

Today's hearing continued in that vein, with Tiversa providing new sensational examples of leaked information. Boback showed off a document, apparently from a senior executive of a Fortune 500 company, listing every acquisition the company planned to make - along with how much it was willing to pay. Also included in the document were still-private details about the company's financial performance. Boback also showed numerous documents listing Social Security numbers and other personal details on 24,000 thousand patients at a health care system and FBI files, including surveillance photos of an alleged Mafia hit man, leaked while he was on trial. He demonstrated to members of the committee how child predators troll file-sharing networking looking for images and data they could use.

Speaking with Computerworld before the hearing, Boback said that all of the information was readily available on LimeWire's file-sharing network after apparently being leaked. The data on the nuclear sites was found on computers associated with four IP addresses in France, though it is not immediately clear where the data came from. The files containing information about the president had Obama's seal on it and a July date.

Though the information was not classified, it was sensitive enough that under normal circumstances it would not have been available even with a Freedom of Information Act request, he said.

This is the third-time that the House Oversight committee has held a hearing on the topic of data leaks on P2P networks. The last hearing was two years ago and featured similar revelations from Tiversa and others.

The problem is well-understood, but remains difficult to stop. The leaks typically occur when a user installs a P2P client such as Kazaa, LimeWire, BearShare, Morpheus and FastTrack on their computer for the purposes of sharing music and other files with others on the network. In many cases, users inadvertently expose not just the files they want to share, but also every other file on their computers.

Boback and others have warned that leaks have resulted in file-sharing networks becoming a vast treasure trove of information for identity thieves, corporate spies and even foreign intelligence agencies. That's prompted calls for lawmakers to force software vendors to implement stricter security controls in their apps.

The only vendor at today's hearing was Mark Gorton, chairman of the Lime Group, the maker of LimeWire, which is the most-used P2P client available. Gorton testified two years ago and promised at the time to implement changes in the company's products to make it harder for users to inadvertently share files.

Today he insisted that the company had implemented many of those changes and that the latest version of LimeWire makes it much harder for data to be inadvertently leaked. Those claims were largely rejected by members of the committee, who blasted Gorton for failing to live up to his promises.

Pointing to the examples offered by Boback, Towns said that the file-sharing industry's promises to self-regulate itself had clearly failed. "Specific examples of recent LimeWire leaks range from appalling to shocking," Towns said. "As far as I am concerned, the days of self-regulation should be over for the file-sharing industry."

Other members want the issue investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and law enforcement authorities. They said that the continued failure by companies such as LimeWire to take more proactive steps to stop inadvertent file-sharing is tantamount to enabling illegal activity resulting from the data leaks.

Towns plans to meet with the chairman of the FTC to determine with the failure stop inadvertent file-sharing constitutes an unfair trade practice by P2P companies.

IT pros continue to lose jobs

As the national unemployment rate continues to creep up, the number of jobs cut  in high-tech industries is also increasing across several IT segments tracked by Foote Partners.

View a slideshow of the most notable IT layoffs in 2009

The IT workforce analyst firm commented on recently released U.S. Department of Labor statistics that show the national unemployment rate is nearing 10% with 467,000 non-farm jobs lost in June. Among the jobs being cut are many of those in high-tech industries such as communications equipment, which lost 2,100 positions in June after shedding 600 in May. About 1,100 management/technical consulting positions were lost in June, after 700 were added in May and 1,600 in April.

Potential signs of a slowdown in job cuts could be found in fewer total positions eliminated, Foote Partners suggests. The computer/peripheral equipment industry lost 2,300 jobs last month, fewer compared to the 3,200 eliminated in May. And 100 fewer positions in the computer systems design/related services segment were cut in June (2,700) than in May (2,800). And the data processing/hosting/related services industry added 600 jobs in June, after losing 3,500 positions in May.

"The computer and peripheral equipment segment lost 900 fewer jobs this time, not exactly good news but certainly some encouragement," said David Foote, CEO of Foote Partners, in a statement. "It's important to note that fewer jobs were lost in the bellwether IT job segments, 1,800 fewer than in May to be exact. It supports continued evidence of counter trending in IT employment that we've seen every month since the Wall Street meltdown last October."

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AMD Chips Used in Iranian HPC for Rocket Research

An Iranian research institute claims that it used AMD Opteron microprocessors to build a high-performance computing system, one more sign that the U.S. trade embargo on Iran isn't hindering that country's ability to import high-tech equipment.

The Aerospace Research Institute of Iran (ARI) posted a document on its Web site that describes a high-performance computer using dual-core chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

The ARI, a government ministry, was founded in 1999 to conduct "aerospace science and technology" research, according to its Web site.

The site says that the SUSE Linux-based HPC system was launched with 32 cores and now runs 96 cores. Its performance was pegged at 192 GFLOPS.

It's unclear exactly when the Iranians started building the system.

"It is more than troubling that an Iranian aerospace entity, affiliated with the government and involved in sophisticated missile research and production, is using U.S. computer equipment for its development work," said Valerie Lincy, editor of Iran Watch, a Web site published by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

In a statement, AMD said that it can't speculate as to how the processors could have been shipped to Iran.

"AMD has never authorized any sales or shipments of AMD products to Iran or any other embargoed country, either directly or indirectly," the company said.

Mehdi Noorbaksh, an associate professor of international affairs at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania, said that Iran buys its technology mostly on the black market.

"That market provides Iran with what the authorities need for these projects," Noorbaksh said.

High technology from U.S. companies appears to be widely available in Iran. Various Iranian firms advertise servers, networking products and components from a variety of U.S. vendors on their Web sites.

The ARI disclosure comes two years after the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center said that it had assembled a Linux-based supercomputer using 216 Opteron processing cores.

This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld 's print edition.

HP revenue drops in tough climate

Computer industry bellwether Hewlett-Packard reported a 3 percent drop in revenue as its major lines of business continued to be hammered by the global recession.

The company also became the latest technology vendor to resort to layoffs in order to cut costs. Over the next 12 months, HP will lay off about 2 percent of its work force, or about 6,000 employees, HP Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak said during a conference call with financial analysts Tuesday. HP employs 321,000 worldwide.

The company remained profitable, however, posting results that were in line with analyst expectations. HP recorded a profit of US$1.7 billion on sales of $27.4 billion. Earnings per share were $0.70 for its second fiscal quarter, ended April 30.

In a hopeful sign, the company reaffirmed its earlier guidance for fiscal 2009, saying it expected to earn between $3.76 and $3.88 per share for the year. That's better than analysts had been expecting. In a Thomson Financial survey of 26 financial analysts, the consensus estimate was $3.71 for the year. However, the company was pessimistic on revenue for the year, saying it would be down by 4 percent to 5 percent. Last quarter, HP had said it expected revenue to be down between 2 percent and 5 percent.

HP Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd said it was unlikely that corporate IT purchasing patterns would change in fiscal 2009. "We have customers that tell me, 'We're just delaying as long as we can until we have to buy,'" he said during a conference call with financial analysts Tuesday. "CIOs have been given marching orders that say, 'Take that infrastructure, keep the infrastructure running... be very particular about new projects you start, and if you can avoid starting that project, avoid starting it.'"

The quarter's revenue drop would have been much worse had HP not seen its services sales nearly double, year-over-year, thanks to the company's Aug. 26 acquisition of Electronic Data Services (EDS). Services revenue was up 99 percent, totaling $8.5 billion for the quarter.

HP is in the process of cutting 24,600 EDS jobs as it absorbs the computer services giant. The company's EDS integration is ahead of schedule, Hurd said, with "roughly half" of those positions now eliminated.

Everywhere else, however, the financial numbers reflected the global slowdown: storage revenue was down 22 percent; midrange server revenue dropped 21 percent; and sales of the company's industry standard servers and business critical systems were both down 29 percent.

Sales of desktop PCs dropped 24 percent, notebooks were down 13 percent and revenue in the company's printer division was down 23 percent.

The company did see improvements in some areas. "We saw improvement in China, and it was material. We saw improvement in U.S. consumer that I wouldn't say was as material," Hurd said. "I just think we're going to need another quarter of data in order to make a meaningful statement about any upturn or anything like that."

HP posted disappointing earnings last quarter as well, as revenue dropped in all of its business units. Hurd responded by imposing wage cuts across the board at HP. He cut his own salary by 20 percent and those of HP's top executives by 15 percent. The company's remaining executives saw a 10 percent wage cut while all other salaries were slashed by 5 percent.

HP had been hoping that these wage cuts would help it avoid layoffs. In a Feb. 18 memo to employees, Hurd said, "I don't believe a major workforce reduction is the best thing for HP at this time."