Earlier this month (May 13, 2017) theintercept.com published an article by Sam Biddle describing how NYU had unintentionally allowed details of an advanced code-breaking computer to become accessible to the public.
An unnamed digital security researcher had been rummaging around on shodan.io looking for anomalies; things that are available on the web but should not be publicly available. Shodan.io is best described as a search engine that catalogs servers and drives that are connected to the internet.
The research stumbled across a hard drive at New York University’s Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing. The machine was described as a supercomputer named “WindsorGreen” built specifically to break codes.
The documents were marked “DISTRIBUTION LIMITED TO U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES ONLY,” “REQUESTS FOR THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE REFERRED TO AND APPROVED BY THE DOD,” and “IBM Confidential.”
The documents were not protected by the requirement of even a username and password.
The researcher contacted NYU and the drive was disconnected from the internet.
Nothing to see here, move along folks.