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Hackers Who Hit CIA Director Break Into Law Enforcement Tools (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The same group of hackers who hacked into the personal email account of CIA director John Brennan have now exploited a vulnerability to gain access to a private law enforcement portal. They demonstrated access to a system called JABS — the Joint Automated Booking System — which is a database of arrest records. "It was through the vulnerable law enforcement portal that the hackers say they also obtained a list of about 3,000 names, titles, email addresses and phone numbers for government employees that they posted to Pastebin on Thursday. The posting, which they indicated was just "Part 1" of a presumably multi-part leak, consisted of a snippet of an alphabetical list of government employees working for the FBI and other federal agencies as well as various local police and sheriff departments around the country. It included job titles, email addresses and phone numbers."
somewhere?
Well, the methods suck but at least SOMEONE is trying to keep the US government accountable.
The knob-slobberers at The New York Times and The Washington Post sure as hell aren't.
These guys are brave.
They'll be dead soon.
This is really one of the bigger reasons to NOT want the government collecting every little tidbit it can on you under the disguise of "national security". Even if THEY actually have no ill intentions with the data, things like this prove that they don't have their own shit together enough to protect that data from hackers/criminals/etc.
I'd find it rather hilarious if the exploit used was one of those the NSA knew about and decided to keep secret so they could exploit it themselves rather than get it reported and patched.
Nothing to hide.
Snitches for sure.
Here's the deleted Twitter messages referred to in the article:
http://tweettunnel.com/phphax
In that link, the Cryptobin link and password are on the bottom. It appears as though the Pastebin has been deleted.
And this does that how?
They got a specialized phone book. If any one dies from this, I'd hope they get charged with manslaughter.
Not sure why you are naming the Times and Post specifically, but they'd announce they had the information, not publishing it openly where it could get people killed. This is assuming the ones listed aren't all desk jobs, but possible field agents.
Think of it like this. There are two groups that are to hold the government accountable. You've got the standard citizens, which I'm assuming you are just like me. Hello there. You also have the Supreme Court. Now the Supreme Courtisf borked, because there has been a movement for the justices to interpret laws by the letter instead of by the spirit. This means that they are not interpreting the meaning of the laws, but just reading it as is. That isn't their job. These justices have been placed by the far right presidents. The citizens need to get out and vote more, which is the simple solution to the problems the nation faces by making the Congress more accountable.
I fail to see how posting contact information of federal employees does anything to keep anyone accountable. If there was a data dump that may help, it would be a list of political donors and their money trails.
Purge the whole database or corrupt all the data in a way that after about 12 months and all the backups have been overwritten they discover the database is useless.
Remember when hackers were real freedom fighters instead of brainless morons that use script kiddie attacks?
You're missing the point of the whole goddam event.
Hackers hit a "freemail" and, from there, wormed their way to important shit.
The government (and businesses, and you, and me) are not competent enough to stop phishing schemes or plug all the goddam holes in the crapware tech vendors have been handing out for years.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Keep it secure, easy keep it on a closed network with no external access , put it on the net and it will get exploited eventually.
"Law Enforcement Tools" is a euphemism for "cops"
If only we had some agency that specialized in security.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
If only the government had a backdoor...
I'm not worried about the bear waking up.... I'm worried about the new regulations to protect the bear.
....will address this as the continuing threat of terrorism
guess it's a good way of making that point, at huge risk to themselves.
Name, job title and phone number of govt employees are a matter of public record (or should be) and as such exposable under FOIA in any case.
The fact that this is regarded as secret says far more about a government than it does about the people publishing it.
Governments and their organizations are routinely completely incompetent with regards to technology. They are used to being able to solve everything the cave-man way: With being able to dish out more violence. As soon as that fails, they come unarmed to a battle of wits.
This is also why any kind of backdoors and intentional weaknesses introduced into IT systems is such a bad idea: No government will be able to keep these safe and very soon they are will be available to the criminal world.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
From TFA,"One U.S. official said the hackers managed to cover their tracks well, but the official expressed confidence they would be found."
If they are found it will probably be through someone shooting their mouth off on a web site rather than by tracing them through some technical means. If you're going do to this kind of naughty then you really need to STFU. It will be interesting to see if the hackers can maintain their discipline.