Slashdot Mirror
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.
This XKCD comic comes to mind...
Weaponized powerpoint. Someone should copyright that.
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.
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?
Iran's SCADA system was attacked and it had a huge air gap.
Basically, the -ONLY- way to keep a computer safe is to...not have a computer. If someone wants in a system bad enough, there is always an attack vector. Be it online or via the best malware carrier of all time -- humans.
I am willing to bet some joe-blow intern infected the network with someone doing some amazingly easy social engineering to him/her.
TL;DR - Internet or not; if someone wants in, they'll get in if two situations are met: 1) The computer is on, 2) People are allowed around the computer.
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'?
Mod +1
The IT team is not doing its job, or IT is begging for changes and no one's listening.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
The Sandworm Team already did.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
© Sarah Palin
FTFY
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.
Weaponized PowerPoint is redundant. 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.
And, of course, PowerPoint has already caused the space shuttle to crash. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"Newspapers: A tiny little part of the internet, printed out yesterday, and delivered to your house"
...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. . . .
The Powerpoint Ranger creed
Discussion of the US Military's love of PPT on Edward Tuft's site. "Mustaches for everyone!" -- actual quote
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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?????
"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 am willing to bet some joe-blow intern infected the network with someone doing some amazingly easy social engineering to him/her.
Who needs social engineering? Just drop an infected flash drive somewhere near the front door, and sooner or later (usually sooner) someone will pick it up and plug it in.
"Nuh-uh", you say? "They certainly have stupid things like autoruns turned off on the Whitehouse network!"
"Hmm, what do we have on here... Random spreadsheet crap, OSHA regulations Powerpoint crap, launch code crap, more random crap, okay some mostly-geezer music I'll check out later, RNC 2016 strategy crap, even more random crap... Hmm, Fappening.Jennifer.Lawrence.Complete.zip.exe? Oooh, awesome, I never did get that on last leaked pic of her!" *click*
if TEH bomb is big enough, then it does not matter whether the order is in an understandable form or not.
If only they had listened to Scott McNealy back in 1997...
Why didn't the Secret Service tackle the hackers BEFORE they even GOT NEAR the White House network?
Math > programming
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.
They just got the passwords from Snowden.
Weaponized Powerpoint files? Sounds like the average management meeting around here...
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!