Democratic National Committee Claims That Wikileaks Has 'Malware Embedded Throughout The Site'

from the say-what-now? dept

Fri, Jul 29th 2016 10:46am — Mike Masnick

We've long been supporters of the concept of Wikileaks around here, though we've had some concerns about some of the decisions it has made. Generally speaking, though, we find the accusations and conspiracy theories around Wikileaks to be somewhat ridiculous. The latest comes buried in a Politico article about the massive amount of dysfunction within the Democratic National Committee. Apparently since Wikileaks released a bunch of DNC emails, leading to chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepping down, it has freed up a bunch of people to bitch and whine about her (lack of) leadership and what a mess the whole DNC has been recently.

But, buried deep within that article is this wacky tidbit:

Staff members were briefed in a Tuesday afternoon meeting in Washington that their personal data was part of the hack, as were Social Security numbers and other information for donors, according to people who attended. Don’t search WikiLeaks, they were told — malware is embedded throughout the site, and they’re looking for more data.

We've seen various organizations impacted by Wikileaks come up with all sorts of excuses and claims about why people shouldn't use the site, but "the site is embedded with malware" is a new one. It also seems hellishly unlikely. It's the kind of thing that someone would discover and it would destroy whatever credibility Wikileaks has left. I guess anything is possible, but this sounds like the DNC freaking out over the leaks and trying to spread bogus rumors in the hopes that it will get people to stop looking at their leaked files.

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Filed Under: dnc, malware
Companies: wikileaks

38 Comments

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UniKyrn, 29 Jul 2016 @ 10:56am

And being the upstanding citizens they are, with safety in mind, the immediate notified WikiLeaks about the problem, right?

After they tried to hide the fact they'd put it there ...
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 10:57am

Nothing to see here, trust us, move along now.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 10:57am

Wait, that's not news.
If Forbes can get away with demanding users turn off their adblockers and then hosting malware-loaded adverts, why shouldn't the rest of the internet be held to the same standard.

That level of malware is background noise.

How can they tell us to _nerd harder_ when they can't nerd at all?
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 10:59am

the DNC is filled with a bunch of knownothings that lack the prescience to understand that they should probably hire better professionals.

Its bad enough that the FBI notified them of the potential hack months before they finally took action, now they're spreading some outright falsehoods to prevent their staff from reviewing the data.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:01am

Don't read it. It's against the laws of whatever we say it is. Also, don't let others read it. It makes us look bad, I mean it's illegal.
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mcinsand, 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:05am

translation
Apparently, 'malware' is a new term for inconvenient truths.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:05am

Don’t search WikiLeaks, they were told — malware is embedded throughout the site, and they’re looking for more data.

Does that mean that an insider would have the missing piece to discover a good scandal if they searched the emails?
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:08am

"... leading to chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepping down"

She did not step down, she stepped UP!!!

And regarding "trying to spread bogus rumors." This is hardly the first time. Claiming that the emails were a result of a state-sponsored Russian hack job seems like another wild accusation, because either they have a smoking gun trail to the FSB, or they're just blowing smoke. (that's assuming a government even needs to hack servers to acquire email, since emails are sent across the globe in unencrypted text and can be harvested and read by anyone along the way.)
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Ninja (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:08am

I think it depends on what they put in their pages. It's easy to imagine some ad network delivering malware there specially when major networks and payment processors actively block wikleaks from using them. Because the US says so.

Still, it smells like made up stuff to scare people away from the site and deviate the focus from their misdeeds.
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David, 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:33am

If they hacked the DNC
Imagine how easy it would be to hack someones home server in their basement. Especially one mis-configured to the point other people would have to disable anti-spam/virus protections in order to receive mail from it.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:38am

You see there's a simple explanation to all of this really and it's basically WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!?
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:41am

Re: translation

Apparently, 'malware' is a new term for inconvenient truths.

ooooohhhhhh! A new movie for Al Gore to make. :)
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SpaceLifeForm, 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:45am

Website does not have to be serving the malware
It can be injected on the fly.
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Padpaw (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 11:52am

never take responsibility, always blame anyone and everyone you can think of, when all else fails lie, lie, lie.

I am talking about both parties here not just 1
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Anonymous Anonymous Coward (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 12:02pm

The Trickle Down
Soon to be former chief technologist for the DNC proudly lists his most recent employment on the application. The Mc Donalds manager laughs and says "you want to run the cash register?"
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 12:43pm

Re:
"the DNC is filled with a bunch of knownothings that lack the prescience to understand that they should probably hire better professionals"

It's very possibly true that they don't know what they don't know.

"Its bad enough that the FBI notified them of the potential hack months before they finally took action,"

I seem to recall both DNC and RNC were hacked in the run up to the 2008 election. I'm of the opinion that there is a high probability the RNC was also hacked this time around. If a state, or someone working on behalf of a state, wants to damage the perception of one side they'll probably want to blackmail the other at some point ("see what we did to them, now what else do you think we have?")
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darkhorseman (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 1:50pm

Malware? Where?
Seriously where is this malware on the site as someone who does malware analysis I would like to know. I haven't check all the attachments in the DNC emails to see if there is malware in them. If that was the case I want to know why the DNC was not checking their attachments.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 1:56pm

New way to distribute malware...
The DNC may know about this malware, because they may have put it there *purposely*.

Leak the malware as part of an email trove from someone or some organization that is famous.

Hide the malware in email in *html + javascript* format, for example. Or hidden in .pdf, .docx, etc. attachments.

When Wikileaks publishes the trove, the malware gets distributed to everyone who tries to read it.

It's going to take a lot of work for Wikileaks to prove that there's no malware embedded in *any* of the emails.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jul 2016 @ 1:59pm

Re:
The new position she was given in the Hillary campaign is a meaningless irrelevant vanity position, so no, she did not step up.
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JoeCool (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 2:17pm

They would know
They know that wikileaks has malware because they have the DNC's emails, which were chock-full of malware. Why, almost half the DNC folk can't boot their computers anymore for all the malware they had, and now that's all at wikileaks.
;)
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Jeremy2020 (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 3:19pm

Re: Re:
He may have meant that she stepped up to DNC Chair when the former DNC chair, Tim Kaine(Where have I heard that name recently?), stepped down and recommended her for the position.
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Jeremy2020 (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 3:20pm

Re:
Why can't the nerds nerd harder and make this about Russia?!
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Brandon, 29 Jul 2016 @ 4:42pm

Not that unlikely
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12146920

I don't have any particular insight into why Google listed them originally, but if you dump a huge trove of email anywhere, there's a good chance it contains some virus files, if the original receivers didn't have great av protection.

The site report still says there are specific bad pages, but the overall site isn't listed anymore.

No conspiracy necessary.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 29 Jul 2016 @ 8:51pm

Nerding harder
It might be with all the magic unicorn key rhetoric about backdooring crypto, both parties have scared away all the nerds.

Especially any nerds that are capable of hard nerding.

We don't like being taken for granted.
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That Anonymous Coward (profile), 30 Jul 2016 @ 12:08am

They try and elect people to a government that tells workers that even if the information is widely available to the public it is still secret & they can face charges.

They have the worst infosec practices, despite paying way to much money for the best of the best. When security by obscurity fails them, they invent boogeymen to scare people from looking for themselves... (seems to be a common policy of governments).
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Jul 2016 @ 12:52am

They're just trying to scare their lame brained, sycophantic drones from visiting the site.
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Whatever, 30 Jul 2016 @ 1:04am

Of course Wikileaks has malware embedded throughout the site. I hate Assange and I think he's an asshole, that proves Wikileaks is a rogue site.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Jul 2016 @ 1:47am

Re:
despite paying way to much money for the best of the best.

that would be:-
The best of the best of people who inflate their salary way beyond what their actual abilities justify..
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Zem, 30 Jul 2016 @ 2:56am

The X Files almost got it right.

The Truth Is Malware
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Tejat, 30 Jul 2016 @ 4:48am

Wikileaks is spreading dangerous truths.
Sounds like malware alright.
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James Buchanan, 30 Jul 2016 @ 5:29am

The?
With every government checking Wikipedia, I would not doubt there is malware in every script there. But, that being said. Where are the emails from the rnc? Why was it not illegal for them to use another server? The law was changed after? Uh? No the rules were in place after tricky dickies three missing minutes. Archive rules of open government for preserving government records.
But don't let a little sexist hate, override your political Bernie love.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Jul 2016 @ 8:14am

Apparently the malware wrote the missing 30,000 emails that Hillary won't turn over.

Also it infiltrated her brain to make her order her PA to destroy those emails.

Also the malware paid the feds tens of thousands of dollars to put shitty 'investigators' onto the case, who were ordered from day one to find nothing and no-one responsible.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 30 Jul 2016 @ 12:50pm

Re: Wikileaks is spreading dangerous truths.
Dangerous truths are malware to any establishment with centralized power.
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mike_m (profile), 31 Jul 2016 @ 4:32am

You can take them at their word
They are the DNC's top security experts.
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Bergman (profile), 1 Aug 2016 @ 6:42am

Re:
Wouldn't making those claims about WikiLeaks constitute defamation?
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Anonymous Coward, 1 Aug 2016 @ 8:04am

Re:
now they're spreading some outright falsehoods

Isn't this par for the course for anything the DNC says?
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Aug 2016 @ 4:34pm

Democratic National Committee sounds just like the MAFIAA: "Don't visit piracy websites, they contain malware!"
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Uriel-238 (profile), 9 Aug 2016 @ 5:02pm

Big media, including the RIAA and MPAA...
...strongly lobby both the DNC and the GOP, so yes, you can expect that they'll sing similar songs.
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