Report: UK secrets briefly leaked via unsecured PDF

No thanks to a “schoolboy error" in securing an uploaded PDF file with confidential information, the British Ministry of Defense may have briefly made public the weaknesses in the UK’s radar defense network, a UK news site reported. The Daily Star said the latest gaffe – where sensitive information was blacked out but could be copied and pasted to a new document – came six months after the agency unwittingly unveiled nuclear submarine secrets. In an October 9 article, The Daily Star said the 22-page report, titled “Air Defense And Air Traffic Systems Radar Transportation Study – Part 2" and posted on Parliament’s website, told how wind farms affect nearby radar stations and how any interference can be overcome. The Ministry of Defense had to race to delete the document and replace it with a correctly secured version, it said. Only last April, The Daily Star said the Ministry of Defense similarly blacked out sensitive portions of a classified government report on submarines’ vulnerabilities but the blacking out was such that the entire contents could be copied and pasted. The report was published on Parliament’s website earlier this year after a Freedom Of Information request by anti-nuclear ­campaigners. In the April incident, it said the “bunglers turned the text background black – making the words unreadable – but crucially left them in place. That meant anyone wanting to read the censored sections just had to copy the text." At the time, it quoted a senior MoD source as saying: “This is hugely embarrassing. Whoever is responsible should be sacked. The Americans will be furious their procedures have been exposed." Graham Cluley of computer security firm Sophos branded the incident as a "schoolboy error," not knowing how to properly redact a PDF. "Remember that simply marking text will not actually remove it from your sensitive PDFs. You also have to apply redactions!" he said. — LBG, GMA News