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Video Raises Doubts About Attkisson's Claims of Malicious Hacking
Was former CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson's computer hacked? Earlier claims that it was are being scoffed at by some security experts, after looking at cellphone video she has released intended to demonstrate that an intruder was deleting files. The video, say various commentators, may instead just indicate a stuck or faulty backspace key. It could be that both things are true (a stuck backspace key, as well as malicious intrusion targeting Attkisson for her political reporting), but it would be helpful to know more of the details on which CBS's (unnamed) hired experts concluded that her machine was breached.
but files disappearing character by character is exactly what happens in movies! Surely it must be the same in real life? Hollywood wouldn't lie to me?!?!
"If a hacker were to infiltrate her laptop and delete her files there would be better ways to do it, it wouldn't be so obvious to her," Theobald said. "It did not look like a hacker attack to me."
All of the experts agreed that hackers would more typically use other methods to delete documents from a computer.
"The way to do it wouldn't be to hold down the delete key," explained Sam Plainfield, of Syntax Technical Computer Forensics in San Francisco, which is what he thinks appears to be happening in the video. Instead, "you wouldn't see a visual indicator that files are deleting, [they are] just gone."
Brothers-McGrew noted "in our experience if you have the ability to be able to access and submit keystrokes on someone's computer, you generally have system level access where you can just delete or modify the file yourself. The user would not ordinarily see what is going on."
He added, "If the government were in there they would most likely be doing it without making themselves known."
Attkisson's 'Hack' In a nutshell, Attkisson claims the government hacked her computers in December, 2012 and she reported it to CBS at the time. She claims a PC and her personal Mac were hacked, and the media has accepted this claim with no skepticism. Mediaite went with the assumption that she shot it in December, 2012.
But a sharp-eyed commenter over at Media Matters observed that Attkisson's video was shot during the Valerie Harper debut on Dancing With the Stars in September, 2013. Here's what WiscoJoe observes:
Has Ms. Attkisson provided an explanation of when this video was taken or why she waited for a year, and until after she went forward with public allegations, to take video documentation of her computer being 'hacked'? Is this the standard of investigative journalism that she was doing while at CBS? If that's the case it may explain why she no longer works there.
She doesn't happen to moonlight for the IRS, does she?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
As noted here: http://crooksandliars.com/2014... If you watch the video you'll see Valerie Harper in "Dancing with the Stars" playing in the background. That happened on or after September 16, 2013. "According to Attkisson's own timeline her computer was 'hacked' in October 2012, she came forward with this allegation in May 2013, but then waited until September 2013 to take video 'evidence.'" "We are supposed to believe that Sharyl Attkisson was hacked by the government and just said, "Oops, I'm hacked!" while she went merrily along with no additional examination, security and a nine-month lag between when she originally believed she was hacked and when she shot the video?" This is buffoonery at it's best!
She got played by bad sources pedaling BS stories about Benghazi. This for a report that made it on the air. Yet she insists that CBS suppressed other stories of hers. Were they suppressed because they were bad reporting, or for political reasons? Since leaving CBS, she has gotten wilder about her claims. She really needs to have been hacked, to give herself credibility. If the government hacked her computer, it would validate everything she has said. If the government is not out to get her, she's indistinguishable from any other terrible journalist. What's funny is how breathlessly the conservative press is running with this video. They obviously have no knowledge about what an actual computer hack looks like. Pathetic.
The video looks like what a hack on TV or the movies looks like. It doesn't look like what an actual hacker would do. That's the problem.
Earlier story reported she discovered classified documents planted on here computer, most likely as a trick to indict her.
If this is a stuck backspace key, then what about the documents?
i mean how stupid do you have to be to leave your computer unprotected and expose it to hACKING?
OMG SOMEBODY IS HACKING ME AND HOLDING DOWN MY SHIFT KEY WHILE I TYPE
Just because it's equally plausible that she's a moron, they rule out malice? What kind of razor is that?
Double edged?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We had a laptop come across the bench once that had been "raped by malware" according to the booking agent. Programs opening themselves, unpredictable behaviour everywhere. Before I had even powered the thing I noticed the enter key was sitting a poofteenth lower than the rest of the keys. Pulled the keyboard and found a fingernail clipping wedged under the lifter. Needless to say none of the reported problems were evident when I loaded it to OS. Why the BIOS did not pick up a stuck key I will never know, but hey, it was an easy $70.
This is what she gets for doing bodywork in front of the machine.
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After my experience with reporters, I really don't give them much credance, as they make money on what BS they can make up, either via "anonymous sources" or other means, in order to get eyeballs.
I remember when belonging to a couple subculture lists, a person asking to join, then starting to ask people oddball questions, such as "do you sacrifice live animals on an altar" out of the blue. Well, people replied to said person snidely... come to find out a few weeks later, she made an expose on how this subculture is pure evil, taking quotes completely out of context, naming names, and even going as far as making up nicknames that people supposedly called each other.
Fast forward a few years, same thing on another culture list, except the reporter was male and was writing about how evil cosplay was, using the exact same tactics.
I think a technical debunking of her claims of being hacked is ideal Slashdot material.
We don't have enough information yet. to properly analyse those claims. What I've seen written so far has been sensationalised and technically incoherent. That's reason enough to dismiss it, but not reason enough to consider it proven false.
According to WaPo, she claims that this iPhone video was taken in September 2013, and not related to the alleged December 2012 incident. It looks like crooksandliars jumped the gun here.
The rather blatent Dancing with the Stars episode playing in the background may have even been intentional to provide additional credence to the video (the timing is dead on with her claim).
That's not to say she's not otherwise mistaken (or outright dishonest), but this isn't the smoking gun you're looking for.
Superficial garbage and just a bunch of shock-jock reporting crap again. Forget whatever 'security experts' were brought on, I would have been thoroughly entertained to see an official 'Hackers' reunion with Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie and alike giving in-character input and play-by-play, then end the segment with "Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything"
And the backspace key just followed suit.
Actually watching the video, you're right. It doesn't look like a stuck backspace key. However, you should take note that (due to horrible vertical video) the right side of the keyboard is never even seen. She could easily be pressing the backspace key herself when convenient. That video should in no way be taken as evidence of anything other that the fact that she owns a Mac laptop.
This.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Sorry, but even that is suspect. She could have borrowed, rented or stolen the Mac.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As I said to the OP you're (correctly rebutting...) replying to, what is showing on a "television screen" is not a real good indicator of the actual time.
It's "an" indicator, but you have to believe two things that are kinda common today : that she's not lying, and that she doesn't have a DVR.
What kind of DVR can playback tv shows from the future? Is that a MythTv plugin?
lucm, indeed.
She wasn't hacked. She has a bad keyboard, a bad USB controller chip in the keyboard, or something similar happening.
I thought I was hacked a couple of years ago. It turned out to be a dead USB controller chip in my Logitech trackball that would periodically "stick" the mouse buttons in up/down positions and randomly move the mouse pointer around the screen. By sheer fluke, it would look like someone was remotely controlling the mouse and making menu selections, closing windows, and so on. But it was just that the mouse buttons were random-firing while the cursor moved about more slowly, so of *course* it would click on something sooner or later.
Being bi-polar and subject to paranoia as a result, I was really freaked out by the whole episode -- until I borrowed a test mouse, plugged it in, and all the problems went away.
That's not to say I've *never* been hacked, but hackers cover their tracks a lot better and don't tend to futz with things like remote-controlling a desktop. They just hit up the file system directly.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Fake but accurate?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Lets not forget, the NSA doesn't just use software to spy on us.
In the past few years, hardware has taken on the new role, and, they have been installing secret microchips into your backspace keys. Not only can they see what your doing, they can now delete text from your science homework!
How do you stop it from happening?
Tor Keyboard, now with complete backspace anonymity. Coming to mass media websites soon!
This got modded up? Media Matters may be left-leaning, but they don't make stuff up when they show video of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly saying bigoted things. If you're mad that they cover right-wingers more than left-wingers, its mainly because right-wingers are more prominent in media and make far bigger and frequent gaffes. Don't complain about bias when that's the case.
This got modded up? Media Matters may be left-leaning, but
No, you don't get it. They don't just happen to be "left leaning", they are left leaning by definition and organizational mission. They are very much like the SPLC in that regard -- from time to time individuals have approached the SPLC asking why they don't give airtime to exposing various left wing hate groups and individuals, and the response has always been "That's not our mission -- we are just pointing out problems we see on the right." If Media Matters started criticizing left leaning liberal excesses of Democrats, their Soros money would dry up in a hurry.
It's not that surprising to me that you didn't know this; probably next you're going to tell me that you get most of your news from Colbert and Stewart on CC. *sigh*
Vinegar Joe, your post is a troll not because it's untrue (perfectly true), and not because it's irrelevant (the coverup has already been well documented), but because... well, honestly I'm not sure.
Leaving the hatchet sticking out of it was a good clue it was hacked.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
That's not a scandal, that's just a (partial) description of an ambassaor's job.
Did you actually watch the video?
If that was really a hacker, and not a stuck backspace key, they he had a serious flare for the over-dramatic.
A real hacker would have simply hacked in, deleted whatever files he wanted, and left without a trace. He wouldn't have sat there playing mind games with the reporter, manually deleting her stuff one letter at a time.
The rubber dome under the enter key might have been sitting just a hair away from making electrical contact, and only made contact when the keyboard deformed slightly by being touched. This would explain the psuedo-random nature of it, and the fact that it didn't happen during post.
Considering that "Traditional American Values" included treating Women and Blacks as property, I'm not too sure I want to go back to those days.
There is no doubt that this was not a 'hack'.
I have a Macbook Pro sitting on a shelf next to me that has a stuck control key that randomly registers during use. It's not physically stuck, and even after fully removing the key and zapping PRAM/resetting everything and even reinstalling the OS, it randomly engages. I've witnessed this myself on different models of Macs with different keys being affected.
This lady just wants to blame everyone else for her lack of mental acuity and imagines she is more important that she will ever be, like most of the right wing herpa-derpa Obummer is terkin er jerbs idiots in news media and the assholes on everyone's facebook forwarding O-bola conspiracy articles.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Maybe it was benevolent hacking, as opposed to malicious?
(Murphy's corrollary: "Friendly fire, isn't".)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
Sounds kinda like Heinlein, only not quite?
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Awwcmon's Razor?