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US Intelligence director’s personal e-mail, phone hacked
- macawfish 11y agoThose men look like their bodies have been trying to die for a while now.
- serf 11y agoProbably the same hoodoo that's keeping Cheney alive.
- oldmanjay 11y agoThe favorite joke of my cohort of old people is how young folks are just dying to get into our club.
- elenorelange 11y agoCan you explain the joke? I don't get it
- fweespeech 11y agoIs anyone actually surprised? The competence of politicians with technology has always been abysmal.
- balls187 11y ago> The competence of politicians with technology has always been abysmal. This assumes that companies do a great job of preventing hacks. They don't. Brian Kreb's paypal account was hacked last month[1]. http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authentication-still-the-norm/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authent...
- fweespeech 11y ago1) He put work documents in a non-government email address that anyone who understood technology would understand was insecure. 2) At that point, the competence of the provider isn't the problem.
- sgarman 11y agoI dislike the word "hacked" as used here because it can mean anything and everything. I hope we get some real actionable information on what went down. There are no real details included other then they were able to access email accounts. Looks like maybe social engineering?
- wavefunction 11y ago>social engineering That's still hacking.
- moheeb 11y agoNot to me, it isn't.
- wavefunction 11y agoPerhaps you'd care to expound? I suspect you hold this opinion due to your age, though I can't be sure as I don't have much to go off of. Hacking to my understanding is exploring a system of rules, learning them inside and out and using those rules in expected and unexpected ways to control the system to your own desired effect, which may be constructive or destructive in nature. I grew up during a time when individuals were doing this with the phone system and computers and other technologies and this included understanding and utilizing social dynamics and interaction to achieve a desired effect, usually gaining access to information that could be leveraged towards further hacking.
- jonnybgood 11y agoNo different than a con artist. It seems to me when techies do conning they call it social engineering. In other words, a social engineer is a techie con artist.
- wavefunction 11y agoHere's the thing about a con artist, "there's no cheatin an honest man"
- matt_wulfeck 11y agoit seems we need better safeguards for personal data for elected officials. I think the government could do it easily: 1. Issue iPhone with finger scanner for MFA for all important access. This works so easy that it would be hard for someone to screw it up. 2. Setup home networks to always use secure tunnels ( custom routers with openvpn settings, Etc). 3. MFA all accounts. The key is to make it so easy to do things the right way that it's hard to mess it up.
- peterwwillis 11y agoFor non-personal accounts they already use multi-factor auth. And adding more authentication and tunnels doesn't defeat all the other attack vectors. Honestly, do you think these people really care if their Facebook gets hacked or the chain letters passed around by their family members get leaked?
- knz 11y agoIt's easy to dismiss the contents of their personal email and social media as irrelevant but surely they represent possible attack vectors for extortion or worse.
- rhino369 11y agoThe problem is that it's personal email, therefore, not the governments business or problem. That's why they aren't allowed to use their personal email for work purposes. For the really important stuff, they don't even cell remote access. You have to do everything at a secure location.
- Alupis 11y ago> That's why they aren't allowed to use their personal email for work purposes Since when? I agree it should be the policy, but it's not. Evidenced by Hillary Clinton's scandal[1], as well as the recent Director of the CIA[2]. In neither case (so far) has the individual been punished. In Hillary's case, the State Department is even siding with her use of private email for official business (including recently discovered classified documents with the header deleted [3]). [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-hillary-clinton-email-investigation-2016-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-hillary-clinton-email-inv... [2] http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/cia-aol-email-hack/ http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/cia-aol-email-hack/ [3] http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/11/hillary-by-ordering-identifying-heading-i-meant-dont-transmit-classified-info-or-something/ http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/11/hillary-by-ordering-id...
- SilasX 11y agoSo? I thought there was no social consensus on an expectation of privacy in email.
- ck2 11y agoAny email you have that is 6 months or older is free to be read by almost any law enforcement from local to federal level, without warrant. Why do you think President Clinton setup a private email server in the first place? The law was signed just before his presidency and he was advised of this.
- 2close4comfort 11y agoWhat can you expect from someone who still uses an AOL account...
- goalieca 11y agoi always expect these senior intelligence guys to have the most disciplined security around (like snowden). Then it turns out the only real guard is "What high school did you go to?" and "Who was your favourite teacher?"
- duncan_bayne 11y agoOnce you go high enough in most organisations, appointment becomes political and / or based upon leadership and vision. Assuming senior intelligence folks practice good tradecraft is a little like assuming that the CEO of a software company is a gun programmer. Often not true, and sometimes for good reason.
- aswanson 11y agoMore often than not, for a bad reason though. Put Ballmer vs Gates or Nadella as a CEO, or, I'd argue, Schmidt vs Page. And, in a crystal ball moment, I'd predict whomever follows Zuck won't be as good as him if he/she has no technical skill. I'd take a technical person who can follow the track of where things are headings "vision" over a bean-counting MBA or "leadership" expert any day of the week for guiding an organization based on technology.
- forgottenpass 11y agoi always expect these senior intelligence guys to have the most disciplined security around (like snowden). When you're powerful (or rich) enough to be on the winning side of the political and justice systems, your independent and individual security is much less of a priority. The system will take care of you. Scooter Libby was disbarred. Edward Snowden is stuck in Russia.
- deciplex 11y agoGood. Let's have the pastebin, please. This is the same guy who lied to Congress, which lie was exposed just a couple months later, and nothing happened.
- rubberstamp 11y agoI'll be not surprised if it contains some bitching about congress trying to bring accountability. I could care less about it. These guys are in the business of finding loop holes and using it. They will lie if they can get away with it
- assocguilt 11y agoCould care less? Surely you mean that you couldn't care less? If you could care less then that means you must already have some level of care. If you couldn't care less then your current level of care could not be any lower which effectively means that you don't care.
- rubberstamp 11y agoIt was typed from an android.. Should've verified before posting. Can't edit it now
- Stratoscope 11y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=could+care+less https://www.google.com/search?q=could+care+less
- godgod 11y agoWhich proves that the intelligence community is above congress. We have more than 3 branches of government and they are all certainly NOT ALL EQUAL.
- dawnbreez 11y agoTeenage hackers, huh? Sure. I bet this isn't actually their work.
- godgod 11y agoI wonder how Clapper feels after this violation. Personally I love the irony.
- tomlongson 11y ago> The group also apparently gained access to a number of government Web portals and applications, including the Joint Automated Booking System (a portal that provides law enforcement with data on any person's arrest records, regardless of whether the cases are ordered sealed by courts) and government employee personnel records Why is it that sealed arrest records are not actually sealed?
- Wingman4l7 11y agoI've always struggled with the concept and purpose of a 'sealed" record. It's like the justice system is trying to have its cake and eat it too -- they want to keep a record that someone went through a judicial process, but the details must not be revealed? Why not just wipe the record and replace it with some sort of generic "John Doe had a legal proceeding on date X"?
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoHere's a corporate trial. To prosecute their case that a competitor stole some of their trade secrets, they have to reveal to the court what those trade secrets are. ("They stole our secret stuff, but we won't tell you what" doesn't fly in court - even SCO got burned eventually for trying it.) But you don't want that stuff sitting in a court record that anyone can walk in off the street and ask to see. So part of the record get sealed - not available to the public. It's still available to the judge, and to the (outside) counsel for the other side, and to the appeals judge if things go that far. And only certain details get protected. One side has to ask for it, and the other side can protest, and the judge has to weigh the protection for the side that wants it sealed against the interest of the public to know what went on. More, a redacted version is (usually?) released eventually.
- lazaroclapp 11y agoDoesn't 'sealed' imply that is retrievable, just not under most circumstances? As opposed to expunged. As I understand it, a court order can allow certain parties to access a 'sealed' record as part of different investigation in the future. It's just that your employer doesn't get to see the whole thing every time they run a background check on you. Why there isn't a proper threshold cryptosystem and chain of custody of keys for sealed records? Well, that's a different question. The answer is probably along the lines of "the justice system doesn't get tech" or "the people who could demand this don't know about it or don't care enough" or even "thus far the implementation has worked ok...".
- vonklaus 11y agoOddly, neither the anonymous hacker(adjective not group), nor a high ranking gov't intelligience officer were available to comment on this twitter picture we found on facebook after it had trickled down from 4chan to reddit.
- late2part 11y agoI hope it wasn't done wittingly.
- typon 11y agoLet me play the world's smallest violin for this horrible crime
- beedogs 11y agoThis is what happens when you hire a dim-witted Luddite to direct US Intelligence. Surprised?