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John Kelly's phone was breached as early as December
- champagnepapi 9y agoI wonder the type of phone he had??
- rl3 9y ago>Kelly turned his phone into the White House IT department after he said it wasn't working and the software was not updating correctly, according to the report. On the bright side, it's not likely that an APT/nation state actor was responsible. Breaking things is pretty amateur hour. Then again, maybe his phone sucked and they just wanted him to get one with a better mic/camera. Perhaps whatever compromising selfies were not of sufficient quality.
- williamscales 9y agoIf it was an Android phone they might root it which would prevent updates from applying as those check the integrity of the system partition before applying.
- nathancahill 9y agoAlso possible to prevent a jailbroken iPhone from updating. In fact, it's desirable, so that you maintain your jailbreak.
- chc 9y agoYou think an unaffiliated individual just recreationally hacked the White House Chief of Staff's phone?
- rl3 9y agoMy first guess would be random malware, actually. I'm pretty sure that when nation state actors compromise a high-level target's phone, they avoid breaking things in such obvious fashion.
- eli 9y agoWriting software is hard. Certainly true for government software too.
- ceejayoz 9y agoIt'd be a little funny if it was multiple nation-state actors breaking each others' malware inadvertently.
- makomk 9y agoIf I recall correctly, didn't it come out that the NSA managed to accidentally brick the core router handling internet for the whole of of Syria when trying to hack it?
- dsl 9y agoThat is an unsubstantiated claim from Snowden. CYBERCOM did launch a DDoS attack against North Korea recently, and it is strongly suspected that they have done so previously (like in retaliation to the Sony hack). https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-signed-presidential-directive-ordering-actions-to-pressure-north-korea/2017/09/30/97c6722a-a620-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sporkologist 9y agoIf only there were some kind of governmental office of intelligence or something, that could maintain security of our government's communications. Well, I can dream, can't I.
- willstrafach 9y agoSounds like WHCA's purview.
- EthanHeilman 9y ago>Breaking things is pretty amateur hour. True, but the NSA did accidentally brick the Syrian border routers.
- willstrafach 9y agoDo you have a link with more information? Sounds very interesting.
- EvanAnderson 9y agoIt was alleged by Edward Snowden: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/13/snowden-nsa-syria-internet-outage-civil-war https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/13/snowden-nsa-sy...
- abecedarius 9y agoI wondered if it might've been multiple independent compromises interfering with each other. As you say, a single competent one shouldn't be obvious.
- iaw 9y ago> Officials told Politico that Kelly had not used the personal phone since joining the administration in January, and has reportedly been using a different phone since. He reportedly relies on his government phone while at the White House. Then why did he bring it to the White House IT team because it stopped working/updating? Edit: To clarify, it's not that he took it to the White House IT team (that's appropriate). It's the question of why he would notice if it wasn't working, the type of technical complaint described in the articles seems to argue a little against him not using it at all.
- wmgries 9y agoAs an important government official, would you rather he gone to the Verizon store when his phone stopped working?
- orev 9y agoYou’ve completely missed the point of this comment
- kornish 9y agoTo play devil's advocate, maybe he was using it for the first time since January and found that it didn't work.
- iaw 9y agoThat's the only scenario I could come up with as well. The line about "stopped updating" may be a miscommunication of "he went to update it after not using it since January, found it not working, and brought it to the IT department."
- wmgries 9y agoHave I? If a White House official finds their personal device has been hacked or isn't working properly, what is the right next step?
- willstrafach 9y ago“Not updating correctly” naturally indicates he was on an older version of his phone’s OS. Remember, only recently we saw fixes released for some pretty serious Wi-Fi vulnerabilities. A close-access attack on a bigh value target like him is not out of the realm of possibility.
- willstrafach 9y agos/bigh/high
- nameisu 9y agoyou cant expect much from old people
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- samstave 9y agoHow is it that with the hundreds of billions we spend on defense tech, why doesn't the USG have its own, private cellular system?
- Animats 9y agoIt does. The U.S. Government put money into Iridium and bought half the airtime. Iridium was about to go bankrupt and de-orbit the satellites. That paid off very well when many US agencies had to operate in the sandbox.
- samstave 9y agoWow, I cant believe that I forgot about Iridium... my mom had a sat phone powered by them when it was consumer... I cant recall her cell bills - but they were massive... Didnt know they were still active. is there a DB some place that has all the satallittes and their respective owners/services/orbits/launch-dates/etc that is available to the public, even if incomplete and salted with bullshit?
- Animats 9y agoIridium is quite active. Phones are about $1000, and airtime is about $1-$2 minute. Anywhere on the surface of the Earth that you can see the sky, you can get through with Iridium. You get voice or 9600 baud data. It's extremely useful when nothing else is available, as in much of Puerto Rico right now. A new constellation of 66 Iridium satellites with more bandwidth is being launched. This will take eight launches. Two launches so far; the third launch is in 2 days, using a Space-X Falcon 9. There are web sites with satellite orbital data.[1] [1] http://www.satview.org/ http://www.satview.org/
- a_t48 9y agoDoesn't that require another set of cell towers?
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
- cujic9 9y agoI feel like this is fairly innocent -- just another tech-illiterate old guy befuddled by all this whizbang technology. And that's worrying. We need to raise our expectations for our leaders, especially those with high security clearance. Seems like there should be some kind of "digital maintenance and security" primer before receiving access to national secrets.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoIt was a phone he was told not to use for government security reasons. Befuddled is "whoops, I trusted the nice man in the email" not "whoops, I ignored instructions to specifically not use this device which might not be safe."
- Turing_Machine 9y agoDo you have any evidence that he was actually using the phone for communication, rather than just installing a software update that he'd heard about? The article certainly doesn't say that.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago"Tech-illiterate old guys" don't a) notice that a software update for their phone has been released b) try to install the update, c) recognize that something is wrong and d) take the phone to spook-level IT guys to check out. They don't even get to a), as a rule.
- iaw 9y agoKelly did the right thing here, as long as he truly hadn't been carrying/using the phone then the compromise is pretty limited. If he had been using or carrying the phone and it was a failure on the recent update that alerted him then it represents two problems: an operational security one and a scandal. I hope that his integrity holds up on this one.
- kelukelugames 9y agoI went to an ex-NSA officer talk. He says assume all phone in DC are compromised.
- cgb223 9y agoHaving lived in DC and worked with the military, I can almost guarantee that’s the case Or else my phone line would click every 15 seconds and forget to ring when calling someone just for the hell of it
- Teever 9y agoPhone taps are done out of band now. As an end user you will never have any indication that your line is tapped.
- beagle3 9y agoOnly if you hacked into the service provider’s network. But if you are a third party, you’ll likely MITM through one of the roaming protocols or directly on the handset, either of which might give some indication.
- ghughes 9y agoLink to the original report: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/05/john-kelly-cell-phone-compromised-243514 http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/05/john-kelly-cell-pho...
- myrandomcomment 9y agoI really hope the NSA is this good at their own hacking...
- aaron695 9y agoWe all get his phone wasn't breached right? Or does it need spelling out?
- OscarTheGrinch 9y agoThe russians now know our deepest national secret: Trump is actually a genius behind closed doors, his public persona is carefully calebrated to be the bad guy that everyone else can unite against. #BogeyManTheory