Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere; I'm not as active these days so I might have missed an ongoing discussion; but this latest story was from earlier today and I haven't seen it being discussed. Some I'm going to post this here, because I think this is a much, much bigger deal than I for one am comfortable accepting: Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians
A bigger deal as in, the smoking gun of Hillary Clinton emails tying the Clinton Foundation to favors she made as SecState? You mean that "bigger deal"? That was the point all along. Everyone got all weepy when the Director of the FBI said she had shit judgment but didn't do anything illegal regarding classified information, and therefore wouldn't be prosecuted. He knew there were much bigger fish in the ocean, and it was only a matter of time before they swam into the net. He didn't even bother trying to pin obstruction charges on her for wiping her servers. Those damn Russians. It's all their fault.
The Clinton campaign is not the same as Clinton's email server from when she was Secretary of State. The campaign servers are going to contain a lot of stuff about targeting voters in swing states. I don't know what kind of dangerous stuff the Russians would find - if they were dumb enough to write down all the illegal stuff they're doing, then yeah, it could be a big deal. Any political entity should assume they've been hacked - they are obvious targets, there are a lot of Russians and Chinese with the skills to exploit vulnerabilities in common software, and they tend to go cheap on their IT departments so they're not up to date with good security.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-hillary-clinton-cyber-attack-000000269.html One of the sources said agents conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email addresses of senior campaign officials. But the campaign, through its lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request for sensitive personal and campaign information data was too broad and intrusive, the source said. I haven't seen this anywhere else except Yahoo News and a few tabloidy sites referencing it. Interesting.
Exactly! I mean... Nixon... NIXON!!! was impeached when thieves broke into his campaign headquarters at the Watergate Hotel and found campaign strategeries that he was going to use in the election. I mean, you would think that Hillary and the Lame Stream Media would learn the lessons of Watergate, amiright? Where's the outrage???!!!111
Whoever runs the SwiftOnSecurity Twitter handle made a great point yesterday. It literally makes no sense for most organizations these days to run their own e-mail server, when they can pay Google or Microsoft or whomever in the triple digits per year and get security and privacy and so on that's going to be much, much better than paying your own guy in the high five figures to do it. My alma mater -- one of the largest public universities in the nation -- contracts with Google for their all their e-mail for students, staff, faculty, and alumni, all with near-unlimited storage. My employer contracts with Microsoft for e-mail (among other things), and the IT staff worry about more interesting things than keeping an Exchange server running and following best practices. Why couldn't the DNC?
It would be a non-trivial effort, and it would take someone who really, really, really knew his stuff and be very, very, very thorough, and more importantly, that person or persons would have to have the motivation to divert attention to the Russians and/or Chinese and not take credit for themselves. (That last part is bigger than most people might think. If you've just pulled something like this off, you're not letting someone else take credit unless you're contractually obligated to do so.) I guess what I'm saying is that it's possible, but it would require a huge leap of faith to believe.
I wasn't going to say this, as a former Google employee and current stock holder, and my job was working with Gmail for companies (and universities, and some government entities - I had to get a government clearance so I could work with customers like the state governments of Colorado and Utah), so thanks for helping out with my former company's marketing. Yeah, Google hosts this stuff and has really good security guys. The only ones who got in to Google (that we know of) were the NSA, and after Edward Snowden leaked his stuff, those holes got closed. When I was there, the Chinese were trying to get in (to get some dissident's email) but (as far as I know) they were unsuccessful - keeping in mind that it wouldn't have been public if they had, and I wasn't high enough to get the real details - Google has a pretty good security culture so they don't talk about stuff like that, even inside the company.
For the most part, you don't look at IP addresses or anything like that, since that will be routed through some other network or whatever, it's not reliable. You look at the tools they used - some malware gets on the servers, and the security company analyzes it to see where it came from and compare with other known intrusions. The article in the original post in this thread says that "Fancy Bear" is suspected of the hack on the Clinton campaign servers - they were also suspected in the DNC server hack, so that means that the tools / code they found is the same or similar enough that they think it's the same set of guys. The tools they use are really their intellectual property - they don't share that stuff since it's what separates them from the script kiddies - so it's not like "Fancy Bear" is going to tell the other hackers "hey, look at this sweet thing we did, here's the code, knock yourselves out". Part of my job at Google was analyzing spam to help improve the spam filters, and after a while, you got to know the different spammers and could recognize their stuff even when the content was totally different - the structure was the same. Like that guy in "The Hunt for Red October", he could hear the engine pattern and recognize what kind of sub it was. The security guys who look at the malware, if they've been doing it long enough, will recognize "hey, this looks like that other hack from two months ago" and eventually get a pretty good picture of the different hacker outfits. I still don't know how or why they can say that the Russian government is supporting these various groups - back when I was doing the spam thing, there were a lot of unemployed Russians with computer skills who couldn't get jobs because the economy sucked for a couple of years there, and they were making their living doing spam. It's not inconceivable that a bunch of Russians could make enough money by hacking American companies or organizations with poor security, scooping up a bunch of data and selling it, or extorting the company for cash, without help from their government.
The Russians hacked the secret Bigsoccer mod threads. The good news is that they didn't find anything worth publishing.
You might find some of the same things, but I doubt you'll find a connection between a SecState and her husband's foundation - in the form of favors to foreign powers for donations. He's not going to, and they'll never stop.
No, you're quite right - I won't find any relationship between the Clintons and the DNC in the RNC files. Betcha I'd find a lot of interesting stuff on the Bush family's relationship to the Saudis, or their foundation's connection to foreign oil producers.
Your attempt at avoiding a discussion of the obvious achilles heel of the HRC campaign is not unexpected. Too bad there isn't a Bush on the GOP ticket, then you might have something. Actually, if there was even a Bush in office you might have something. But there isn't.
And I bet if we hacked Trump's tax returns we would find payments from Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin.
Why on earth would the DNC have emails from Hillary Clinton's time at State? In case it wasn't clear from my earlier post, it's a wild, wild stretch you're making. And you do it so flippantly, with such little awareness that it belies [/gasp] an assumption that Hillary is perpetually guilty of something. You don't know what exactly, but it's gotta be bad. Very bad.
I'm talking about the role of hacking in the election; the possible role of Russia; etc. I think this is the elephant in the room--this is a REALLY BIG DEAL and yet pretty much everybody here fell into predictable partisan "sides." It's not the content of the emails I'm concerned about--it's the idea that an outside party is using hacked emails as a weapon in an ideological war. I'm struggling to find the right way to phrase this, but...it seems to me that our politics are at a crisis point, where there's a lot of unfocused anger against 'the establishment' whatever that may be. There's a total lack of faith in any institutions, and no patience for due process, etc. I mean--fine, if you don't like HRC, or don't trust the DNC, then by all means focus on the content of this or that specific email. But...I don't think this is how a functional democracy works. EDIT: I probably should have made it clear--the title of the thread is what I'm getting at. Serves me right for posting from my smart phone.
A very revealing hack that none of the mainstream media sewage pumps are covering: http://www.investors.com/politics/e...ia-blackout-of-hacked-george-soros-documents/ If this doesn't bother you you're beyond redemption.
Not sure what in that doesn't translate to "billionaire behaving responsibly" when you remove all the right wing angst expressed. What in it do you think should be the most bothersome?