Democratic National Committee Claims That Wikileaks Has 'Malware Embedded Throughout The Site'
from the say-what-now? dept
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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After they tried to hide the fact they'd put it there ...
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Wait, that's not news.
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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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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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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Isn't this par for the course for anything the DNC says?
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translation
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ooooohhhhhh! A new movie for Al Gore to make. :)
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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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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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Nerding harder
Especially any nerds that are capable of hard nerding.
We don't like being taken for granted.
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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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If they hacked the DNC
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Website does not have to be serving the malware
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I am talking about both parties here not just 1
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The Trickle Down
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Malware? Where?
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New way to distribute malware...
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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They would know
;)
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Not that unlikely
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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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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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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The Truth Is Malware
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Wikileaks is spreading dangerous truths.
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Re: Wikileaks is spreading dangerous truths.
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The?
But don't let a little sexist hate, override your political Bernie love.
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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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You can take them at their word
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Big media, including the RIAA and MPAA...
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