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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.
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.
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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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.
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.
I do not know how stupid you have to be, but I do know there are a lot of these people out there.
I used to get infected computers all the time, ask them what kind of anti virus they run and get told they don't need them because they don't have a virus. I don't know how many people say they turned it off because it kept quarantining some file they downloaded to help them get movies or music or programs. They all swear the guy in the chat room knows what he was talking about. I even had one moron attempt to sue me in small claims court because a program I installed kept deleting his files. Of course it was an antivirus and the files were ones he downloaded from some p2p network. I replaced several components and a case on a computer that took a flight from a second story window because it kept freezing and locking up. After the owner picked it up and took it home, he called angrily complaining that he just paid me $500 and it does the same damn thing. I stopped over and found the problem to be a bad cord on his mouse- $20 dollars later, his old system would have been just fine still.
I don't think you would believe how many of those people exist out there.
I'm very curious about that as well. If they were real classified documents, then the FBI should be able to investigate, and I'd like to think that this would lead either to information about a crime possibly committed here, or to assurance that it was all a misunderstanding/paranoid delusion and there were no classified documents. Not that FBI agents don't sometimes lie or get their investigations quashed by Nixon administration types, but hey, just humor my naive optimism a little.
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.
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!
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.