US officials accidentally granted access to White House secret plans – WP
Photo: US officials accidentally accessed White House plans (wikimedia.org)
A mistake in the United States allowed thousands of officials to access confidential White House plans. The incident is conneced to improper document sharing on Google Drive, reports The Washington Post.
The US government suffered a serious privacy incident when thousands of federal employees accessed classified documents, including White House plans and security information.
According to The Washington Post, these documents became available due to the careless use of the Google Drive platform.
The incident occurred when career employees of the General Services Administration (GSA) transferred important materials, including blueprints for White House security and bank details of Trump administration suppliers.
Due to a misconfigured Google Drive share, more than 11,000 employees gained access to these documents. The documents were not explicitly marked secret, but were considered important to national security.
The leak in the United States
This incident was part of a larger series of cybersecurity problems in the US government.
Last month, another security breach occurred when senior officials inadvertently added the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic to a closed chat room discussing sensitive military plans.
The US authorities recognized this incident as a serious mistake and are continuing to review the situation. Despite the serious consequences, there has been no indication of any leakage of classified information or direct harm to national security.
The use of Google Drive in government agencies without proper control raises questions about the level of digital security in the United States.
Security experts point out that such mistakes can lead to serious consequences for national security.
The mistake with Signal
As a reminder, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz mistakenly added him to a chat room of high-ranking officials. They were discussing US plans to attack the Houthis in Yemen.
As it turned out later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent information to the chat about timing of US fighter jets and drones take off and the US launch of its missiles half an hour before the operation.
The Atlantic claimed that if such information fell into the hands of “ill-wishers,” the consequences for the pilots could have been “catastrophic.”
Read more about the scandal with top US officials in RBC-Ukraine's article.
