Pentagon’s Pokémon orders: game must go (outside) for security reasons:
Anyone working at the Arlington, Virginia, headquarters of the US Department of Defense searching for Squirtles and Snorlaxes on the Pokémon Go app has been told to do it outside the building, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Times.
As of a few weeks ago, there was even a “gym” – where Pokémon Go players can fight and train their virtual pets – inside the Pentagon. But the idea of staff playing a game that meticulously tracks the location of every player appears to have worried the largest military in the world.
Given the rules of Pentagon tours – no cellphones – the only people who would have been able to compete in the gym while it existed were employees. Defense officials were concerned that players inside their facilities could be tracked via the game, potentially giving away the location of rooms, and that information accessed by the game could be stolen by foreign spies.
Source: theguardian.com
On Wednesday the Department of Defense announced that it’s launching a “Hack the Pentagon” pilot program to pay independent security researchers who disclose bugs in the Pentagon’s public-facing websites, and to eventually roll out the initiative to the DoD’s less public targets including its applications and even its networks. The DoD hasn’t yet named which of its websites are part of the program or how much it plans to pay for bug reports. But the announcement nonetheless represents the first time the U.S. federal government has launched a bug bounty program. This is an acknowledgement that even an agency with the Pentagon’s significant cybersecurity resources and expensive contractors doesn’t have enough eyes to find all its hackable vulnerabilities.
Source: Wired