USA Navy blocks free web mail services

USA Navy blocks free web mail services

Free web mail has touched new heights with the launch of Google Gmail. Its now practically to share content worth Megs in quite a few minutes. This has resulted in US Navy getting alert about the possible security implications. And the latest news in is that they have blocked access to commercial email services provided by Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and Google amongst others.

This blockage applies on military and civilian personnel on ships or ashore in the United States and overseas. Another reasons besides security implications for this ban is to prevent the viruses and worms entering the navy computer systems. This could possible affect the administrative and business working of the US Navy networks.

Ron Steiner, public affairs officer for the Naval Network Warfare Command said in a statement: “With commercial web mail standards we don’t know the exact level of protection and whether it meets the Navy’s standards for network security. It just makes our job of protecting the network that much harder.

However, this network of computers is still away from the Department of Defense’s “classified” network, which is the primary network of Navy computers handling sensitive data.