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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.
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?
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'?
© 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"
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
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?????
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.
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 only they had listened to Scott McNealy back in 1997...