Snowden Used Social Engineering To Get Classified Documents

cold fjord sends this news from Reuters: "Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues ... to access some of the classified material he leaked. ... A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments. ... Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator. ... People familiar with efforts to assess the damage to U.S. intelligence caused by Snowden's leaks have said assessments are proceeding slowly because Snowden succeeded in obscuring some electronic traces of how he accessed NSA records. ... The revelation that Snowden got access to some of the material he leaked by using colleagues' passwords surfaced as the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill intended in part to tighten security over U.S. intelligence data. One provision of the bill would earmark a classified sum of money ... to help fund efforts by intelligence agencies to install new software designed to spot and track attempts to access or download secret materials without proper authorization.'"

Comments

Sucks to Have Worked with Snowden...

[DexterIsADog]

...though his revelations of the intelligence gathering practices of the NSA are a gift that just keeps on giving.

Funny that the people he duped to obtain some of the information are being relieved of their jobs (though not their lives, presumably), but the people participating in the overreach won't suffer any consequences.

Re:Sucks to Have Worked with Snowden...

[MrEricSir]

Funny that the people he duped to obtain some of the information are being relieved of their jobs (though not their lives, presumably), but the people participating in the overreach won't suffer any consequences.

The real question is how many other times these same NSA morons were duped by our country's actual enemies. Only a fool would believe Snowden was the first to come across all of this information.

Re:Fire them

[g01d4]

An admin requesting your password raises flags, but it's possible many provided it because they didn't want to argue. That being said, you'd think at least one of the 20+ would have gone to their local security person as a follow up.

This Thing Reeks

[cffrost]

Excerpts from Reuters "article:"

(Reuters) - Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues at a spy base in Hawaii to access some of the classified material he leaked to the media, sources said.

Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.

While the U.S. government now believes it has a good idea of all the data to which Snowden could have accessed, investigators are not positive which and how much of that data Snowden actually downloaded, the sources said.

This garbage has the same quality sourcing as the hit-piece published by The New York Times and The New Yorker that spread unsubstantiated rumors claiming that Snowden had given classified documents (i.e., unpublished material) to Chinese and Russian officials.