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Report: Russians Hacked White House (newsweek.com)
20 points by kirubakaran on April 7, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



Interesting. How interesting that this happens right after Obama signs a couple of controversial cyber-crime/hacking executive orders, Russia apparently hacks the White House (if you can even call exploiting stupidity a hack).

The biggest joke of the story is this part:

"Experts told CNN the hack spread from the State Department to the White House through a phishing email sent from a State Department email address."

Seriously? You hire people, give them security clearance and yet they're opening up emails with suspicious attachments? What's next, we are going to hear of White House staff being scammed by Nigerian 419 scams? How does this even happen? If you're going to hire people (at the White House of all places), make sure they have an above beginner level of using a computer. This is the kind of thing I'd expect my dad or grandmother to fall for because they're not tech savvy, not someone in the White House.

As usual, you can spend millions on security programs, scrape and retain metadata, you can even read emails of other people but the weakest link no matter what level of security or care you have taken is and always will be people.

If the White House can't even protect themselves, how can we trust the NSA and whatever other government departments are trawling our data and storing it won't fall prey to the same attacks? Seems a lot of people that work in the political architecture have been around before computers became mainstream.

I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist nut, but isn't it convenient the Patriot Act is up for renewal on June the 1st? The White House conveniently just gets hacked a few months out? Maybe it is a coincidence, I don't know. I want to see logs, I want to actual proof this was Russia and not the Chinese or whomever can pull off a move of this magnitude.


The incident happened last October so those inferences are clearly spurious.


OP could be commenting on the timing of the "White House hacked" headlines being published. Certainly a convenient time for garnering public support of those cybersecurity bills.




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