A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way A single typo from a Clinton campaign aide gave Russian hackers access to a decade's worth of emails, some 60,000 in total, owned by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Clinton campaign aide Charles Delavan wrote in an email to one of Podesta's aides. later published by Wikileaks, that Podesta must "immediately" change his …
It is interesting how the Gmail security feature of sending an email warning about accesses from unusual locations was subverted by the phishers. I have got some of those when travelling, but now I don't remember if the real ones contain a link to Gmail account information change. If they do, Google should consider removing it, and informing users that they should enter Gmail by explicitly writing the Gmail URL instead.
A lot of services appear to have no idea how easy they make it to spoof their emails - I see Google and LinkedIn spoofs regularly and my health provider (BlueCross) just loves to send me messages every week telling me to click on the link to see the latest information in my account with them. Occasionally we get emails from the Bank with an HTML attachment that they want us to open to complete their security procedures - last time I checked these were legitimate however I have the mail server configured to strip all risky attachments so no one here ever sees them.
Basic Security - yea, we've heard of it.
A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way. DNC figure John Podesta told to follow phishing link, instead of link to enable 2FA
Yes, if it wasn't for that typo, we never would have learned that:
The Dem's primary was rigged against Sanders all along so that Hillary would win,
That the DNC was anti-Semitic,
That CNN gave Hillary the questions to a debate in advance,
A White House celebration of gay pride was actually a scheme to reward wealthy DNC donors,
How the biggest donors to Hillary's campaign were promised Federal board positions,
The Chariman of the DNC demanded that an anti-Clinton newscaster on MSNBC be fired
et cetera, et cetera...
If it wasn't for the hack, the truth would have remained buried.
"The Dem's primary was rigged against Sanders all along so that Hillary would win"
Now THAT is something someone should be in jail over. Not only was it a subversion of the electoral process, Sanders was the only candidate worth a damn out of everyone who stepped up on both sides.
"Yes, if it wasn't for that typo, we never would have learned that:"
Perhaps true, but rather missing the bigger picture. The purpose of these hacks was not to reveal what was rotten in Hillary's campaign, it was a process to manipulate and discredit the US election. Yet people are too busy accusing each other about the details to see that they're still playing their part in the process, exactly as planned. Those behind the hacks don't care that their activities have come to light, indeed that just helps the intended aim. Some people don't believe any of it? Even better! Dischord and distrust rules. Poke the puppets with a stick and watch them turn on each other!
Hillary has been a power-hungry puppet, who put her personal ambitions above her party's. Trump has been a useful idiot, too full of himself to appreciate his own very real limitations. Someone, somewhere, is laughing themselves to sleep each night at the pair of them. The joke's on you, America, and as long as you focus on the wrong things, it keeps getting funnier.
@ Just Enough
"The joke's on you, America, and as long as you focus on the wrong things, it keeps getting funnier."
The problem with the election seemed to be choice. I was quite happy for trump to win, not because I think he will be any good, but because it might help fix US politics. The republicans offered what was referred to as a clown car because they offered choice and in the end trump was effectively independent. The democrats offered hillary, 1 extremist and 3 nobodies (if I remember the count right). Nobody popular would run against her as she was the parties choice regardless.
I get the feeling the last couple of presidents (Bush and Obama) and the democratic party sealed the fate for mainstream politicians this time around.
as I dont work for the NSA, who are the only people outside of the KGB who actually know what happened, I can only read widely on this "phish or not" story. . .
Interestingly, the UK's former ambassador to Uzbekistan has reported that *HE* brought these emails over to JulianAss.(TM), having found them behind a tree in Election-Land.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/Ex-British-ambassador-WikiLeaks-operative-claims-Russia-did-NOT-provide-Clinton-emails-handed-D-C-park-intermediary-disgusted-Democratic-insiders.html
Well, isn't the great game complicated!
I'm normally pro Craig for his manifest integrity, but as I said, the secret squirrels on both sides know what actually happened, will they bother sharing with the internet using citizens or the voting citizens or the rest of the world?
typo's aside, have a great festive season, if you can
"Which is why Clinton and her predecessors all used their own servers."
I always wondered why everyone was going after Hillary for using a private server and not the State Departments incompetent IT organization that drives people to use personal email systems.
I understand that the primary driver was that BlackBerry only supports a single email account per device, but an organization like the US Government would have enough power to get RIM to change it, or to write their own system. They had the capability to fix the issue long before it became such a massive problem. But that seems to be how the government does stuff...
I work for a medium/large company, and even we got Microsoft to add a feature into Exchange to accommodate our email setup, the US government would've been able to just breathe a word and it'd be done.
"Not because a private server would shield those emails from Freedom of Information act requests and, thus, public scrutiny?"
Funnily enough, no. Which is actually perfectly obvious if you think about it. Most of her email is going to and from other State officials... who's email is still FOI-able. So her havingt her own server would make no difference whatsoever. Much of the rest is confidential... which means it's not subject to FOI.
Clinton's use of the private server was bad, since she wasn't authorized to do it. But honestly, I don't think there's any real evidence to suggest she was doing it to dodge FOI. Certainly not as much evidence as there is to suggest Trump was in cahoots with Putin, anyway.
You think you're joking, but actually, since the State Department was comprehensively compromised over two years ago (to the point John Kerry and his team literally had to set up Gmail accounts) while almost no-one knew about the Clinton server, one of the great ironies of this whole thing has long been that her private server was much, much more secure than the official government channels during the period it was in use.
And yes, I say that even though it was still running Server 2003.
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@Symon,
As an interesting aside, "Inflammable" came first (late 16th, early 17th century). "Flammable" came about and gained popularity some ~200 years after inflammable joined the English language because of the confusion about the prefix in- meaning "not" in most cases and meaning "in" or "into" in the case of inflammable.
Even avoiding words that can be confused by simple typos isn't enough to stop this sort of thing - in this case I suspect he may have omitted the word "not" which I find ludicrously easy to do. I also often write "now" instead of "not" and vice versa.
Obviously the more important the message is the more likely I am to bugger it up.
Email can be a terrible way to communicate.
It takes a little time, but if everyone re-read what they had just written before committing the message, fewer mistakes would be made [1]. I'm a bit too far the other way in this respect: I will now click 'Preview', check for spelling mistakes, repunctuate, 'Preview' again ...
[1] ... and add footnotes. The trick in proofreading your own work is to dis-remember what it was that you *think* you have written (because that's what your brain will see, half the time). Advancing age is a great help :)
[2] repunctuate seems not to have been a real word... until now.
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"How about just using simpler words to start with?"
Even that can go horribly wrong. I know an electrician who was lucky to escape with his eyesight and nothing worse than bad sunburn after a miscommunication. He locked off an electrical panel to allow him to work on some HV (and high current) equipment. Power leads disconnected but naked and dangling a little too close to each other. But no problem because he had everything locked off. This was in the days before electricians had personal locks and locks tended to be keyed alike.
Someone called out to him "Can I turn the power on?" and he shouted back some simple words "I'm working above you. DO NOT TURN THE POWER ON." Sadly all the other guy heard was "... TURN THE POWER ON." The arc copper-plated his face and specs and gave him sunburn on the face and hands.
"How about just using simpler words to start with?"
Someone called out to him "Can I turn the power on?" and he shouted back some simple words "I'm working above you. DO NOT TURN THE POWER ON."
That's the opposite of simple. Simple would have been NO! except I worked in electronics for years and never heard that word from a tradesman - the technical parlance is F**K OFF.
But back to the main subject. The reply about the phishing email was way too complex, he should have gone with you're fired, clear and to the point, difficult to misconstrue.
Wassat? You don't think its right that privacy has been invaded?
I see its quickly turned into a government & politician-only protection issue:
>“This cannot become a partisan issue," the senators wrote in the joint statement. "The stakes are too high for our country."
Does it really take some Russian hackers to bring into focus what the US gov does routinely?
" now all-but confirmed to be the handiwork of Russian hackers "
So, its everything but proven???
So the speculation, hyperboly and likely, lies have decreed "Must be the ruskies". "We cant prove it but we know it is."
Well in a court of law, gut feelings count for fuck all, eveidence is where its at. Now, put up or shut up.
"They both conclude Russia(n state backed hacking outfits) were responsible -- they just disagree on motive."
This.
Which, I might point out, I've been saying for weeks, including the stuff on Cozy bear and Fancy bear. Resulting in downvotes from all the Trump supporters on the forum (which translates into about 3).
Proving it's the Russians isn't actually hard. The techniques are consistent with known Russian actions from Ukraine and Georgia; the threat sources are recognizably from Russian sources, and there's Russian in the code used. It took the non-partisan external infosec company the DNC hired about a day to figure out the source was Russia. This is not difficult and not controversial.
Determining motive is the sole difficulty - did they want ot elect Trump, or did they just want to cause chaos? Given that Hillary is a dangerous super-hawk who would likely have engaged in an aggressive containment strategy, while Trump appears to admire Putin and is trying to appoint one of Putin's buddies to run the State department, and all the Russian leaks targeted one side in the election exclusively, there's a lot of weight behind the CIA's assessment.
The alternative, of course, is simply that the Russians figured (along with everyone else) that Clinton had it in the bag and so were just trying to de-legitimize her, and Trump was so unlikely to win that it wasn't worth trying ot damage him.
No, she loses the election because the current rules use the electoral college system as the basis of electing a US President. The popular vote count is (for the moment) simply an interesting statistic.
I'm wondering: if emails that the DNC (and the RNC) are so important and valuable, whey are they on the servers of a public company (Google/Gmail)?
> The CIA has said it was definitely to help Trump, the FBI is saying they wanted to delegitimize the election process.
And both of these instances of press-tadigitation require that we ignore the role played by Wikileaks in actually bringing light to the lucre of the hacking effort(s): how do accounts from each of these two agencies convincingly explain that Wikileaks would necessarily have published the trove(s) delivered to it? Why did the hackers not just fake the emails (or even create new documents) so salacious-yet-plausible that their near-certain publication by Wikileaks or similar would have had the lady in Washington scrambling to get out a denial?
The slipper don't fit in either case.
Well in a court of law, gut feelings count for fuck all, eveidence is where its at. Now, put up or shut up.
Courts of law are really bad places to prove anything except the blindingly obvious. That's why the scientific community use peer review and debate as to how to interpret observable facts, rather than having two adversaries use rhetoric to persuade a technically ignorant jury that they are right and the other is wrong. Courts are particularly awful at handling complicated issues like this which involve many very detailed and technical points.
The CIA has said it was definitely to help Trump, the FBI is saying they wanted to delegitimize the election process.
Neither. The less stable and more inward problem bound is USA, the more room has Володька to maneuver. It is a classic destabilization, not deligitimization exercise. Played by the book and the USAisian political critters are being skillfully moved by a chess grandmaster on the board of life without even noticing.
I am seriously surprised that Gill Stein has not pulled out of her sleeve a list of 100 people in each state which did not vote, but had absentee vote cast for someone on their behalf. "Leaked to her" - wikileaks style.
It will fit the overall pattern of making sure everyone in USA is at everyone's throat.
"It will fit the overall pattern of making sure everyone in USA is at everyone's throat."
From the outside, looking in, that's what US politics seems to be for at least the last couple of decades. People who voted for the "loser" claiming that the "winner" is not "their" President etc.
Whether it's corrupted already or corrupted by hackers, Russian or not, doesn't really seem all that relevant, the average US voter seems to have little concept of how the democratic voting process works. Maybe it's all this "no one left behind" and "everyone's a winner" driven into them from childhood that makes them totally unprepared for a competition where there can be only one winner. Not that that is unique to the USA, but that's where it seems to be the most obvious.
So all of those accusations against Hillary, or the claim that there were millions of illegal immigrants voting, should also be ignored until proven, right? Ditto with your accusation of lying. But you're missing one important thing: some information is dangerous to disclose. The evidence has been given to those whose need to know exceeded the risk of that disclosure, which does not include you. It takes a tremendous ego for someone to believe they are the sole arbiter of truth, and that they personally must be convinced of a statement's truth before others are allowed to consider it. Nobody's being thrown in jail based on rumor. It's OK for people to claim and believe what a preponderance of evidence - both public and vetted but not disclosed by our elected representatives - suggests.
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