Whoops: Al Queda Sysadmin Will Catch a Bullet to the Brain
Back in 2001 I was working at a startup that monitored customer logfiles and IDS alerts for security violations. At one point we were getting ready to shutdown backend databases for maintenance and we needed to notify our customers about the outage. My brainless boss sent an email from our SOC account to all of our customers, but put their collective email addresses in the CC (carbon copy) line instead of the BCC (blind carbon copy), thereby exposing our entire customer database to all of our customers. Many customers complained about this simple breach. My brainless (and now hairless) boss almost got canned.
Now Al-Queda, the terror organization operating from within Afghanistan, has made the same rookie mistake, tipping off our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to the entire recipients’ list of Al-Queda’s monthly newsletter.
From ForeignPolicy.com here:
In a Dilbert-esque faux pax, a Taliban spokesperson sent out a routine email last week with one notable difference. He publicly CC’d the names of everyone on his mailing list.
The names were disclosed in an email by Qari Yousuf Ahmedi, an official Taliban spokesperson, on Saturday. The email was a press release he received from the account of Zabihullah Mujahid, another Taliban spokesperson. Ahmedi then forwarded Mujahid’s email to the full Taliban mailing list, but rather than using the BCC function, or blind carbon copy which keeps email addresses private, Ahmedi made the addresses public.
The list, made up of more than 400 recipients, consists mostly of journalists, but also includes an address appearing to belong to a provincial governor, an Afghan legislator, several academics and activists, an … Afghan consultative committee, and a representative of Gulbuddein Hekmatar, an Afghan warlord whose outlawed group Hezb-i-Islami is believed to be behind several attacks against coalition troops.
There is no formal reprimand for a mistake of this magnitude. My wife suggested this dumbass would get a revolver shoved up his giant Afghani nose. Meanwhile, I’m sure dozens of dopes replied to all “Unsubscribe! Unsubscribe! For Allah’s Sake, Unsubscribe!”
