[rescue] Netra from NSA?

[Thomas Gallaway]

Well I checked what the company is buiding who owed the ip and they 
kinda do .gov stuff like radar and stuff... So maybe the machine was 
used on a nsa project or so...

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002 12:19AM -0500, Loomis, Rip wrote:
>>>  I may be wrong (and I probably am), but doesn't the 5th line from the
>>>  bottom say it was from the NSA? And it has a drive in it. Weird.
>
>>  Uhm this is definately not a NSA machine. Trust me.
>>  NSA in that case might mean something like Name Server Authentication
>>  or something...
>>  But not the NSA you know hehe...
>
> I both agree and disagree.  It's incredibly unlikely that this system
> was ever connected to NSA's internal classified network--although
> the NIS domainname that comes up was perhaps a legal/believable one as
> of several years ago.
>
> My best guess, having seen something similar, is that someone who
> used to work at NSA configured it in a test lab (or that some 
> contractor
> who was supporting NSA configured it as an unclassified shadow version
> of a system that was operating on the classified network.)  Just 
> because
> it claims to be in a NIS domain with a believable NSA name doesn't 
> mean
> that the system was ever physically inside an NSA facility.  I can
> easily put a system together on the network in my house and give
> it the IP address of www.whitehouse.gov, and then print logs from
> it and sell it on eBay.  I've proved nothing by doing so, however.
>
> If it ever *was* operated on a classified network, the IP address
> space is meaningless--anyone who operates a detached network doesn't
> go to ICANN/ARIN (or other RIRs) to get IP address space.  Note that
> if it was an unclassified mirror of a system on the real/production/
> classified network, the test network IPs probably would match the
> production IPs--that's how I've done similar things anyway (with a
> NAT box configured as the default gateway, so that I could still get
> access to external resources.)
>
> I don't think anyone can *definitely* give a pedigree on this system
> based on the info in the auction--but the checks and re-checks before
> a system leaves a TS/SCI environment are pretty thorough.  I'm 
> sticking
> with my best guess(es) above.
>
>   --Rip
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