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More to the point - he has doubled down on his reporting being correct, but failed to acknowledge that he - himself - was the weapon that the attacker used to i
by InTheArena 5y ago
More to the point - he has doubled down on his reporting being correct, but failed to acknowledge that he - himself - was the weapon that the attacker used to inflict damage on Ubiquiti - their employees, users and shareholders.
Krebs got taken. Pure and simple. I can see why he might not want to acknowledge that, or do any soul searching on it, but when you were part of the problem, you have a responsibility to fix your part in it, even if it was a unwitting accomplice.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago(From a questioning perspective) If a source happens not to be who they claimed to be, hiding for whatever reason, but the information in the story is newsworthy, credible, verifiable, and authenticated, does that mean the story should not go forward then?
- InTheArena 5y agoThe story already went forward. It means that a correction should have been issued.
- brankest 5y agoThis is why journalists try to get multiple sources to corroborate what the other is saying.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoThat's hardly very likely with whistleblower stories, all you can do is be careful with wording like "<name> claims" "<name> alleges" to qualify the reporting. I read Krebs I find it hard that he wouldn't retract something if Ubiquiti (or someone else) came to him with evidence showing the "whistleblower" was a fake that he wouldn't retract the article based on new information. He seems like a good journo to me and has nothing to lose by doing such. He reports on a lot of stuff and now one is going to be constantly fact checking every story they ever put out there. It's impossible. I suspect Ubiquiti filed this before they ever contacted him about the whistleblower being a fake.
- stormbrew 5y agoWhat's the counterfactual here? If Krebs was wrong to report on this, what's the world where he didn't look like? Is anyone better off? It doesn't seem like it. Either way, Ubiquiti had a major security issue on its hands. Krebs didn't make that true by reporting it, it was true already and he wasn't wrong to say that they did, regardless of some niggling over whether he knew two people were actually the same person lying to him about who they were.
- thesausageking 5y agoJournalists aren't supposed to take what a "whistleblower" says at face value. If Krebs were a journalist at the NYTimes, for example, they would've done a lot of background research to corroborate the insider's story before publishing the quote. And then either would not have run it or at least have been clear about how little he knows about the "whistleblower". And the bigger issue is, once the truth came out, he should've done a retraction and discussed what he knows about "Adam" and how he was likely the hacker who did the extortion.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stormbrew 5y agoIgnoring that I didn't ask anything like "what should Krebs have done later?": > he should've done a retraction and discussed what he knows about "Adam" and how he was likely the hacker who did the extortion. That's not a retraction. That's an update based on new information. Those aren't the same thing. This is just begging the question of his knowledge. It doesn't really seem like Krebs, even if he is a shitty journalist overall (I know very little about him, so I'm not going to assume one way or another), said anything actually false at the time he said it. Is a journalist, once they report on a story once, required to continue reporting on that story forever?
- thesausageking 5y agoIf a journalist is complicit in helping an extortion attempt with one of their stories, then, yes, any ethical journalist has a responsibility to update it. This will (hopefully) be a pretty rare occurrence.