Circumventing the DoD's SmartFilter
by Comspec - Sigma Nu
I'm a 22-year-old network security engineer for the Department of Defense and have been for a little over four months now.
I've been operating in some fashion in the information industry since I was 14. I guess you could say my job is pretty interesting. I work normal hours: 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. I'm a Sigma Nu and I live at Old Dominion University in their crappy semi-new development the University Village. ODU isn't all that bad.
On my first day on the job I noticed the DoD had implemented a proxy that continuously grows in its filtering capabilities based on policies written in by contracted individuals here in my office. It's called SmartFilter. What a pain in the ass this thing is.
If you want to write on restrictions of information, this is one hell of a big one. Of course it's a government network and that makes all the difference from a legal standpoint.
Personally, I'm all for allowing certain things to be run on my network within limited means. It is widely known that streaming audio is a bandwidth killer in some instances. Well, due to limited funding here at NEXCOM this was said to be a big problem. Until they added it to the proxy list as a big no-no. Oh well..
The chief security guy sits in the office next me. He's continuously trying to get our organization up-to-date with the security standards set forth by Visa and other organizations for transactions but he lacks in just about everything else. For Christ's sake we don't even have any of the necessary security patches for XP yet.
The following is a set of guidelines to go by to circumvent their current system. By no means should this information be used to break any laws. Don't blame me if your supervisor runs in and confronts you about this.
I just thought it would be an interesting read. I would appreciate some comments back from those individuals who are able to attempt this in their own departments. If you would like to know any more information pertaining to this network hit me up. I think you'll find it to be a pretty interesting but a crappy international setup.
Anyways, back to the real meat...
Let's say your job sucks and you want to pass the day a little faster.
So you decide to surf a little and see if you can't find a good radio station that has the magical ability to make you not sleep at work. Well, you soon realize that this is nearly impossible with all the filtration going on. I admit this is pretty cheesy but an interesting way to get around it. I'm going to use the example for DI.FM. That seems to be the only music that can keep me awake at work while I am updating network diagrams or fielding phone calls from shitty outposts in Japan or some other remote location around the world.
1.) Go to Archive.org. (Everyone knows this place well, or should. Read more on them on their site.)
2.) Once you're there in the top-middle portion of your screen you should see the Wayback Machine input text area. For this example I used www.di.fm. That's Digitally Imported Radio. Click "Take Me Back."
3.) The next page that comes up will list the dates that Archive.org crawled across the site and archived its contents. You'll want to look for the most up-to-date one. Out of habit, I usually choose those that have a *. That denotes that the site was recently updated. The last entry that was showing when I performed this was April 1, 2005. Click on the link.
4.) Once the Digitally Imported site comes up you can scroll down to the music of your choice. From this point you have two options. Try them both and see which works for you.
- Using Winamp, scroll down to whatever music you choose. Click on one of the links listed under Listen Now. Your media player should automatically navigate though Archive.org and begin to buffer the stream from DI.FM.
- Still using Winamp, right-click one of the links listed under Listen Now and copy the shortcut. Then open up Winamp and under the file menu choose to input the URL. Copy and paste the URL there and click O.K.
Like I said before when work has got you down this is always an option.
Please continue to experiment with the internal network.
Enjoy the information and you all keep up the thirst for information and good work.