There has been a fair bit of publicity recently about a leak of classified data concerning Marine One, the presidential helicopter President Barack Obama travels in.

According to reports, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application named LimeWire installed on a defense contractor’s computer in Bethesda, MD permitted access to files containing confidential information belonging to government agencies to the public. These files were subsequently found on a file server in Iran, and included blueprints and the avionics package for Marine One.

Had the Defense contractor been using Quest’s Policy Authority for Unified Communications - Compliance Edition, it would have been able to prevent this leak.

Unlike some solutions on the market posing as Data Leak Protection (DLP) solutions that only scan a handful of well-known ports like 80, 25 and 443, Policy Authority - Compliance Edition includes technologies which scan all 65536 ports for leakage of any data, on any port, using any protocol. Policy Authority is available in software form or as a hardened appliance.

In addition to P2P security and compliance, Policy Authority also provides security and compliance for public instant messaging (IM) solutions (e.g., MSN, Yahoo, AOL AIM, etc.), enterprise IM solutions (Office Communications Server, SameTime, Jabber), financial IM solutions (e.g., Reuters, Bloomberg, Pivot) … along with archiving for all of these and Blackberry PIN-to-PIN messages.

Let’s hope that this is the last leak of its kind and that Federal Agencies make a point of reviewing security and compliance around P2P, and implement solutions to protect against inadvertent or willful leaks of this nature.