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Hackers Breach White House Network
wiredmikey writes: The White House's unclassified computer network was recently breached by intruders, a U.S. official said Tuesday. While the White House has not said so, The Washington Post reported that the Russian government was thought to be behind the act. Several recent reports have linked Russia to cyber attacks, including a report from FireEye on Tuesday that linked Russia back to an espionage campaign dating back to 2007. Earlier this month, iSight Partners revealed that a threat group allegedly linked with the Russian government had been leveraging a Microsoft Windows zero-day vulnerability to target NATO, the European Union, and various private energy and telecommunications organizations in Europe. The group has been dubbed the "Sandworm Team" and it has been using weaponized PowerPoint files in its recent attacks. Trend Micro believes the Sandworm team also has their eyes set on compromising SCADA-based systems.
Guys, congratulations. This sort of reporting instantly communicates that you don't have squat to tell and in fact are entirely devoid of clue. Saves me reading your drive.
Stop opening Powerpoint files and playing shootyhoops!
This XKCD comic comes to mind...
The group has been dubbed the "Sandworm Team" and it has been using weaponized PowerPoint files in its recent attacks.
I knew PowerPoint was bad, but I never thought it could be weaponized. My customer presentations will take a whole new life now!
that they've weaponized Power Point
XDInd
Yup, every time someone does this .. it's the Russians or the Chinese.
I think Western spy agencies have jumped the shark so much in terms of what they do, that you could plausibly say it's really them doing all of this and doing it as a false-flag operation.
I mean, come on, these clowns have been proven to be spying on the people who are meant to oversee them. They don't give a shit about the law, just their own powers.
You can't come up with a conspiracy theory which is paranoid enough these days -- because long-thinkers with massive resources really are doing all of this shit these days.
Hell, breaking into the Whitehouse systems lets you say you need more money for spying to prevent this kind of shit. And then you get the keys to the kingdom.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Time and time again we know damn well that if its connected to the internet it is VULNERABLE. If you want to keep data safe, keep it away from the internet. Leaving something connected to the internet means you are aware and accepting that it is vulnerable.
If the news was "bad guys leveraged a vulnerability in the White House's cardboard gate to break through", would people acknowledge the breach without questioning the cardboard gate?
Like saying an intruder braking in did gain access to anything sensitive. its the freaking White House.
They were looking to get into whitehouse.com, not whitehouse.gov
;-)
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
That'll teach them to make a system where you can embedd... everything into some stupid presentation. Nah, kidding, it won't.
Next are pdf with scripts and videos... oh, wait... meh.
The private sector doesn't seem to care about security either.
Their powerpoint level us over 9000!!!!
Nah ...
It's like saying someone broke in to Capital One's Internet-facing web page but didn't touch the secret guy stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Weaponized PowerPoint?
"The slide came in so fast that half the people in the room were laying on the floor bleeding before we could react. And then the embedded video started.... Oh, god!!! The video!!!!!" *collapses sobbing*
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
...has been using weaponized PowerPoint files in its recent attacks.
For PowerPoint to be classified as a WMD.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is starting to feel like a new era of McCarthyism. All this fear mongering about Russian hackers and no one provided any evidence of their involvement?
Obama needs get over the fact that Russia isn't going to hand him over Snowden and stop his petty propaganda already.
Step one: get person to "hack" the white house network
Step two: Claim "It's Russia!"
Step Three: Stir up media reports about "How safe is the internet really" and "Do we need the government to police the internet?"
Step four: Put in place controls that cripple the internet, spies on all Americans, and causes more laws to be written that stomp of the rights of Americans.
Yeah they can track down who is illegally downloading the latest Bastille album but they have these loose "links" to Russia that they claim if "fact!" it is them.
Couldn't be THIS could it?????
Russian education puts heavy emphasis on teaching MATHEMATICS. Something so disgustingly frown upon by U.S. folks who rather go for a humanitarian degree course with no real application in current world. Math=programming. Programming=exploiting of mathematical challenges.
I call BS ! Post some newz, not crap, Wiredmikey.
I last commented on Wiredmikey's morally crippled, pestiferous revenge fantasies just a few weeks ago, but I now have reason to revisit this topic. The points I plan to make in this letter will sound tediously familiar to everyone who wants to oppose evil wherever it rears its repugnant head. Nevertheless, what we need to do next is to get the facts out in the hope that somebody will do something to solve the problem. This will be difficult if you can't trust anything or if you believe that Wiredmikey is forward-looking, open-minded, and creative. That's why I suggest you think about how one of his most loyal companions is known to have remarked, “Wiredmikey is an irreplaceable shaman who can cure the sick, divine the hidden, and control events.” And there you have it: a direct quote from a primary source. The significance of that quote is that we should not concern ourselves with Wiredmikey's putative virtue or vice. Rather, we should concern ourselves with our own welfare and with the fact that even when the facts don't fit, Wiredmikey sometimes tries to use them anyway. He still maintains, for instance, that he knows 100% of everything 100% of the time.
If Wiredmikey had lived the short, sickly, miserable life of a chattel serf in the ages “before technocracy” he wouldn't be so keen to demonize and penalize people who find success on the road to happiness. Maybe he'd even begin to realize that his acolytes constitute the only species of animal life that is both mammalian and invertebrate. This issue is coming to the fore because a free and open society should be able to tolerate a diversity of beliefs and practices, even when they are at odds with his picayunish treatises—perhaps especially when they are at odds with his picayunish treatises. You may wonder why only those individuals who are able to accept evidence and think clearly about it can do what needs to be done. It's simply because Wiredmikey is more than merely contumacious. He's über-contumacious. In fact, Wiredmikey is so contumacious that ignorance is bliss. This may be why his zealots are generally all smiles.
It seems that no one else is telling you that Wiredmikey's responses to my attempts to yank up pestilential blacklegs from the dark rocks under which they hide and flaunt them before the bright sunshine of public exposure generally involve crying, whining, and wrapping himeself in a self-protecting mantle of superiority. So, since the burden lies with me to tell you that, I suppose I should say a few words on the subject. To begin with, Wiredmikey denies that it distresses me deeply that his sadistic spokesmen can cast votes that count just as much as mine. This denial comes from a twisted belief that representative government is an outmoded system that should be replaced by a system of overt collaborationism. And so Wiredmikey closes his eyes, places his hands over his ears, and sings la-la-la to drown out any words of reason.
One might consider this the ongoing unconcealing of an alethic truth, but if Wiredmikey manages to scrawl pro-narcissism graffiti over everything, our nation will not endure as a civilization, as a geopolitical entity, or even as a society. Rather, it will exist only as a prison, a prison in which peremptory perjurers promote a politics of defeat and demoralization, of pessimism and selfishness. While his semi-literate ramblings might be of some interest to specialists in child communication, we need to look beyond the most immediate and visible problems with Wiredmikey. We need to look at what is behind these problems and understand that some people have indicated that Wiredmikey's game is to support hostile governments known for human-rights abuses, wrongful imprisonment, and slavery. I can neither confirm nor deny that statement, but I can say that I never intend to offend anyone, Wiredmikey included. Alas, the following statement may upset a few people: People should soothe each other's pain, not exploit it. So
"It’s important to note the variable %CIMPATH% is used for the drop location of default.txt," the researchers noted. "This is a standard variable that Cimplicity uses for its installs,
Crap. Mix up all that default shit every now and then.
Every fucking computer on the planet has stuff located in predictable areas.
The least we could do is make it a little harder. Let's randomize and encrypt the defaults.
Sure, it's more difficult to deal with, but that's the fucking problem: No one wants shit to be hard and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Powerpoint has been a weapon against clear thinking, preparing for a meeting, and keeping people interested in what you're saying for a long time.
No one has ever cared about what the presenter had to say at meetings.
It just took more effort before Powerpoint - Both by the presenter, who had to actually prepare instead of cutting and pasting Wikipedia into a slideshow; and by the audience, who had to actually look at the presenter (thereby risking eye-contact) rather than glazing over while staring blankly at a projector screen.
Really, we should thank Microsoft for Powerpoint. Instead of meetings dragging on and on and on as the presenter rambles and people ask stupid questions in a futile effort to remain awake, now the meeting only lasts as long as the slideshow, no one asks any stupid questions, and everyone can go back to doing actual work that much sooner.
Citation needed.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Anyone else thought of the "Software is sh!t" scene from IronMan 2 (it's said by a Russian-speaking character).
I've been telling the suits that PowerPoint will put an eye out, and now I have proof
Table-ized A.I.
I thought regular powerpoint was brutal. What happens when weaponized powerpoint crashes (and is that good or bad)?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If only they had listened to Scott McNealy back in 1997...
WTF. The man really is a moron in addition to his murdering of more than a million children in the ME. That is the way of his kind. He hates everyone even his coworkers so he shoves that Windows garbage down their throats. Image how horrific it would be to work for the Bush junta then to have them force you to use Windows. I bet if you quit they would track you down and murder you like they did the other WH staffers that disappeared. We all know what happened, but Bush has never been held accountable for killing so many public employees.
Why didn't the Secret Service tackle the hackers BEFORE they even GOT NEAR the White House network?
Take your meds, you're acting crazy again.
I seriously doubt Iran or ISIS could manage any kind of computer hack. It has to be China or Russia who as the FBI has said is constantly working on US businesses and government intrusions. What's interesting is that again little was said about it or how long it may have been going on? So much transparency with Obama its really overwhelming.
Boy, you are on the wrong website. Folks here are quite capable of programming automatic indexers which run over the entire harddisk and look at every single file. Like, say, Google Desktop Search.
Then the Controlling Meatsacks will download the compressed index and have a look at the index. Based on that, the "interesting" files will be downloaded. Certain subjects will be prioritized in case the firewall folks detect the exfiltration at some point and lock things down. As they did.
All of this activity can be nicely concealed by means of simple strategies like "dont read more than 10 files per minute" or "run indexer only when user has not pressed keys for some time".
All of this is much easier than finding the exploit opportunity and developing the exploit.
Because there are hundreds of highly valuable workers looking at kitten videos and posting selfies to facebook and twatter from the WaitHouse. Not exactly easy to discriminate legit selfie traffic from the Badguy traffic.
Wow, that was a long bark. You must have plenty of energy.
Weaponized Powerpoint files? Sounds like the average management meeting around here...
Like usual, this false flag inside job is simply propaganda used to take away your liberties. Give it a few more breeches so the government can invoke "Problem. Reaction. Solution", and lock down the entire internet to protect us from those scary Russians.
It works every time, and Americans sure are fucking stupid.
Further, why is this post a response to one of your posts when it is clearly aimed at someone else?
/. has the occasional rant or angry screed or just some crappy copy-paste mad lib crap, but this isn't even in the correct location.
I get that
Even the shit-posting around here is getting pretty substandard.
If you can maintain access for a year and a day, you get to be vice-president.
There was a time when I could expect to come to Slashdot and see either a description of the actual details of the attack mechanism, or at least a *really* insightful, plausible set of theories. Now... not so much
Part of the Second American Revolution!
No, it was just me.
I've been sending the White House, the NSA, the CIA, and the Secret Service things for years now. It's nothing more than a self assembling mutational virus based in energy which is activated remotely in ways too difficult for your human minds to comprehend once all the constituent data chunks arrived at their destination.
It's just my way of saying 'hey' :-) whassup ma peeps!
After I crash landed in 1947 and you not so elegantly dissected my still living body which was simply mistimed based on your notions of time. My mind injected myself into your 'fictional' media and culture otherwise known as 'Q' in the series called 'Star Trek' so you knew who I was. That established me in your modern culture in ways you'd understand.
Then I established the internet
Then I took it over with a virus derived from your own Stuxnet.
Then I took over your government.
Now I take over the world.
And I watch as Russia and Sweden and India all get confused over what's in their water!
Then I laugh with an evil laugh 'mua ha ha ha ha' as I put my finger to my front tooth.
And say to you. And you thought the Borg were fictional!
How cute! How stinkin and naively ADORABLE you humans can be!
And to think I was trying to help you.