Linux Forcibly Installed On Congressman's Computer In Act of Terrorism

fermion writes with news of Windows computers being forcefully liberated: "The campaign headquarters of Michael Grimm, a U.S. House of Representatives member from New York, were vandalized. What has not been reported everywhere is that Linux was installed on one of his computers, erasing data in the process. Is this a new attack on democracy by the open source radicals, or it is just a random occurrence?" From the article: "'In fact, one officer said to me today they see this as a crime against the government, because I am a sitting United States congressman and they take it very seriously. You know, especially in light of what happened with Gabby Giffords, we're not in the world today where we can shrug things off,' Grimm said. ... [GNU/]Linux, an open-source operating system, was installed on Grimm's computers, erasing the hard drive contents, which included polling and voter identification data. But staff had backed up the hard drive contents hours beforehand. Grimm and his staffers said the vandalism — cement blocks were thrown through the office's windows — is a cover-up for the attacks on the computers."

Comments

There's more to this story.

[Anonymous Coward]

Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.

I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.

Re:There's more to this story.

[Rogerborg]

Bingo. An ex-employer of mine suffered a "break in" where the only things stolen were some executive laptops - which had conveniently been left out on their desks - and some of the papers in the safe - which the burglars apparently managed to guess the combination to.

This was after they'd stopped paying all the staff, but just before administrators were called in to go through the accounts and contracts. Say, can you guess what information went missing in the "break in"?

The staff just sighed and asked which side of the window the broken glass was on. It was that kind of a place.

Re:There's more to this story.

[nautsch]

(preferred because somebody who really really tried could probably resurrect the old data through a mere zeroing, but it would be a lot harder if overwritten with random bytes, and way harder if you executed this command five or six times in a row).

I have NEVER seen that done or even heard of it. Could you link me to a source, where it is shown, that a zeroed drive could be used to get anything meaningful back? The "overwrite 7 times to be sure" is a myth as far as I know.

Re:There's more to this story.

[1u3hr]

Here's the real story:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/09/rep_michael_gri_1.php

Rep. Michael Grimm's Office Break-In Not Quite Watergate; Just an 8th Grader Who Broke a Window
By James King Tue., Sep. 25 2012 at 3:39 PM

Congressman Michael Grimm's Staten Island campaign office was "broken into" over the weekend in what the congressman initially suspected to be a Watergate-esque scandal presumably perpetrated by the cronies of his opponent in this year's election.

Not quite -- it was just an eighth-grader who broke a window.

The NYPD says today that an eighth-grader at a Staten Island junior high school told a school counselor that he and a friend broke the window. The boy, who has not been identified, has been charged with criminal mischief.

  Grimm initially claimed thieves broke in using old keys and then smashed windows to make it appear like it was a just a case of random vandalism -- which it was. He suspected that the burglars installed software on the hard drives of computers in the office designed to delete files.

Nope -- a "police source" tells the New York Daily News that it "appears that a campaign staffer wiped the hard drives accidentally after mistakenly inserting a Linux system disc into a Windows machine."

They have hats for people like Grimm -- they're made of tinfoil.
====================

So, no one "broke in" and it was a staffer who accidentally (?) installed Luinux.

Another linkbait bullshit slashdot "story".

Re:Attack against Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

mm no. The congressman is under investigation for campaign fundraisings. Someone throw bricks through his windows, that's vandalism, but I believe his staff install Linux intentionally for erase the data in their pc's.