Hackers Breached White House Network... And Some Other Country Told The US About It
from the best-cybersecurity-folks? dept
So, there's a story in the Washington Post that's getting a bit of attention about how Russian hackers apparently breached a White House computer network (an unclassified network, so not as troubling as it could have been). And that story is kind of interesting, but it seems like the bigger deal is this:U.S. officials were alerted to the breach by an ally, sources said.Wait a second. After all we've been told about the brilliant minds at the NSA/US Cyber Command and their "cybersecurity" skills -- it seems immensely troubling that (1) the US didn't catch this themselves and (2) that some other country did catch it. So, uh, just why is some "ally" monitoring the White House's network?
As for the rest of the report, as the Washington Post notes, this isn't even that big of a deal. Foreign state hackers are always going to try to breach US government computers, and sometimes they're going to succeed. That's the nature of the beast. But, it does seem profoundly odd that it was discovered by some other country.
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Filed Under: cybersecurity, hacking, network, nsa, russians, security, us cyber command, white house
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Ally telling US is not an indication that NSA did not know
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Re: Ally telling US is not an indication that NSA did not know
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Re: Ally telling US is not an indication that NSA did not know
With the NSA watching, probably, what was caught, was the NSAWatcher. Oops, shouldn't have said that. And their backdoor.
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NSA.. are a collection of cretins, deviants, voyeurs and traitors
The NSA collects everything but like the bully child stealing all the toys... isn't capable use any of it.
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Trust is for silly children and the religious
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Makes sense
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Outsourceing
I hear there's some Keith Alexander guy that's has some new magic security technology that he came up with all on his own.... but he doesn't come cheap.
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Or it might just be that the ally noticed the tracks others left as they themselves sneaked in. Whichever.
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Re:
There's more than one way to notice an intrusion, after all. Since it was an ally that noticed, it would make sense for them to be monitoring the other end of the connection.
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"maybe because it did not know or maybe because volunteering information is just such an alien concept to NSA employees"
Or maybe because they needed time to remove their own trail,
or maybe because they wanted to see how good the team monitoring the WH were,
or maybe they wanted to see which ally would tell the WH and which wouldn't even though all of them knew (who's a tittle-tattle?)
or maybe because the culprits weren't actually Russians,
or maybe because they felt the WH didn't need to know,
or maybe because the brilliant cyberwarriors are too busy monitoring the real traitors (that would be us)
and so on ad infinitum. Spying is such a fun, endless game. Guaranteed career for life, good pension, easier flying a keyboard than risking life and limb.
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The career may be guaranteed, but the life is not.
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Playing devil's advocate
The monitoring might have been at the other end. For instance, the "ally" might have been after a hotdog smuggling ring, and found in their seized servers evidence of data obtained from the White House network, given to them by the real hacker in exchange for a box of really good hotdogs.
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Re: Playing devil's advocate
Looks like the WH needs to hire that Keith Alexander guy, he has to be the best since he is the most expensive.
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Re: Playing devil's advocate
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This needs to be in all-caps, my apologies in advance
I mean, FUCKING seriously. DO NOT ask for blanket surveilence permission if you CAN'T CATCH THE BAD GUYS.
Protip: The American Citizens en masse are NOT the "bad guys."
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Extraordinary claims...
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Hackers had access to the We The People website
This means war!
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Terrorist watch is working
At this point they realised a draft copy of the TPP had been released - clearly the action of criminals since the government would never do that.
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Seriously?
Not at all. We all know the NSA guys just love to be telling the technical "truth" hopping with glee when questioned. Wiretapping all the Whitehouse and Congress traffic would not sit well with some of the "leaders" in there.
So they let their friends technically do that (likely providing the infrastructure for it and physically applying the taps in the course of a cooperation program, only actually calling it "tapping" for some occult combination of things not coming together here) while handing them all the traffic to and from their respective parliaments in return.
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This is a surprise?
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Defensive security, gets no where near enough attention hence inovation......imagine app/program thats designed for cases like these, thas higly compatible with the majority of devices out their, continually updated, created to be easilly implemented by programer, to patch any past, present future vulnrabilities
Thats DEFENSIVE security..........what the hell have they been doing
Oh right, OFFENSIVE security, i.e. the very thing that creates the need for DEFENSIVE security in the first place
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It seems much more likely...
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No doubt some new bill will be made to combat this security breech by taking away more rights you guys have that will somehow fix the incompetence of those in charge.
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Re:
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NSA... .. we now know the S stands for stupid or sloppy
Why is their Crime?.... inept gov, inept fbi, inept nsa.
They have all the info.... but none of the intelligence.
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Alternatively, ...
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