A quick perusal of the download shows this to be very much what it says: internal data. There are a bevy of contact information, employee files with resumes/photos, correspondance with NATO and other contractees, requisition forms and planning documents, presentation slides, and the like. I haven't seen anything particularly damning, although I'll keep digging.
Funny pictures, plural. With text accompanying many of them. Kind of like reddit, 4chan, digg, et al. But of course none of us would ever peek at those site while at work. Not something to get worked up over by any means. Someone who isn't me had a read over the files and had this to say.
Email addresses. They're common, but these aren't just any emails. We can now attach these address to a specific organization and try to target them to get the information we want; if there is any in their inboxes. Think OpSec.
Bids and purchase orders. This takes time, as you actually have to read them, but you can find prices and bidding tactics of ManTech and maybe undermine them next time around. OR as entrepreneurs you can read them and learn how to acquire government contracts.
Tons of employee IDs in there used to login and out of services. You can guess why these are important.
They were in negotiations ~2005 with NATO to undertake maintenance of SatCom Afghanistan. Do some research, find out if they have the contract, new vector to exploit; very nice pay off. From the same document we learn a valuable piece of information about how NATO accepts bids from clients:
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This will be a competitive procurement. We will be up against large American and European firms. We were informed that NATO puts a requirement for a Bid Bond in their RFPs to eliminate some of the small firms from the newer NATO countries that are part of the former Soviet Union. Experience has shown, over the past year, that these small firms tend to low bid on the basis of a lower wage base in their countries. We do not believe that this procurement lends itself to that bidding environment as the dollar value and the Bid Bond requirement may preclude these small firms from bidding but, nevertheless, price will be the determining factor.
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In fact, all of the SatCom.doc file is interesting.
There are usernames and passwords in an .xls files. They all share the same password as well. Maybe it works the same in other places on their intranet?
To be honest, a lot of the material is outdated and none of it is particularly interesting. Sure, you can learn a lot from it... but it's not bleed edge. So take it for what you will.
Where'd you see passwords? I tried grepping but got a lot of false positives.
Also, I found 06b1 Contractor's response to labor questioned...doc particularly interesting. It shines a lot of light on the qualifications requirements, and how contractors do or do not live up to them. Definitely worth a read.
"Binary file Fuck FBI Friday III: ManTech/Username and Password Assigment IDS Waiver - Final_15 Aug 05 GWB.xls matches"
If only I'd read till the end...
Thanks for the tip. They appear to be default u-p pairs, that one would hope would be changed upon first login. Still, strange to see that lying around on a computer at a firm that provides security contracting for LE and the military.
Slandering them with the tax dollars abuse is a bit premature. It may be a manager who's offering it for download to improve morale for example, or a myriad of other reasons.
"LOL"-type responses generally don't go over too well here. In fact, humour in general is strictly forbidden. It's kind of like smuggling drugs across the border: you have to hide it really well.
No worries. It's not that humor is unappreciated, rather that people tend to come to HN for relevant information and insightful commentary (by internet standards, at least). Many early adopters of reddit came here as the SNR there dropped, and while we're politely asked not to say HN is becoming reddit, it's still a worry for many. Thus, when people see flippant comments that don't really add a huge amount to the conversation that couldn't be achieved with an upvote, they tend to downvote them. There's nothing wrong with that, as that's what the down arrow is there for, but it can take some time for a newcomer to learn the ropes and figure out what kinds of comments are or are not appreciated. Whenever I see someone who's plainly confused, I try to help out.
Thanks for the information. I try not to post anything that is meaningless. In that comment, I had asked a genuine question after the word "LOL". that LOL was there because I found the prior comment funny. I will take care from now. Thanks once again!
You have to remember: not everyone who works at Mantech is working directly on a government contract, and even the employees who are get lunch breaks, so this doesn't indicate anything in and of itself.
Wonder if Anonymous and Lulz really have access to such a wide array of 0days or if NATO, FBI, etc are really extremely behind in their security systems.
Though I dig how these guys are exposing gratuitous waste at the government level, I fear that the gov will respond not by fixing what's broken, but by imposing higher levels of control and monitoring of all internet users in general (in the US).
Well, topiary was supposedly the one who wrote that distinctive prose, so if it's different now that would be a clue as to whether the feds have actually got him or not.
IMO this is definitely not written in the same voice as previous statements. I am confident that experts would confirm this, it seems obvious. There is a cursory nod to maintaining the same style, but the voice just isn't there.
Now of course that's what we would expect if we believe topiary was arrested. However, the other possibility is apparently that he was not arrested and is in fact a swede pretending to be from the UK. In that case, the original voice was a very good imitation to start off with, so it would be trivial for him to drop it and sound more generic.
It's a little less megalomanic commie "viva la revolucion" than some of Anon's other announcements and much more in keeping with the LulzSec releases. I'm fine with that.
I think the idea is not so much, "look at the bombshell we uncovered", as "your security is a joke, and you're the people providing security services to the government".
Edit: this was far too good to pass up. By far the most damning thing I've found: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36733961/Funny%20Pictures.docx
That's right. A bunch of 'funny' pictures, pasted into a word document, and saved on the company server. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gents.