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Teen Hacks US Intelligence Chief's Personal Accounts (vice.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the poking-the-bear dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has now joined the CIA's John Brennan in having his personal online accounts hacked. A teenage hacker known as 'Cracka' has claimed responsibility for the hack, reporting that he had infiltrated Clapper's home telephone, online accounts and his personal email, as well as his wife's Yahoo account. Cracka had managed to change the settings on Clapper's Verizon Fios account so that any calls to his home number were redirected to the Free Palestine Movement group in California.

16 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. On the one hand ... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

    On one hand, kudos for being ballsy and doing this.

    On the other hand, if you go messing around with the Director of National Intelligence ... well, you should expect some pretty heavy consequences.

    And I'm sure they'll find all sorts of trumped up charges to make your life miserable.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:On the one hand ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ts ts, slashdotters and their totalitarian fantasies...

    2. Re: On the one hand ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Cracka" is a cracker not a hacker. Hackers do not engage in malicious activity but explore systems to learn about them.

      BULLSHIT!

      You kids who have retroactively decided to re-define hacker and cracker are so full of shit it isn't funny.

      Historically there is no such distinction, and "hacker" was the only word for about three decades or so. A hacker may or may not have done anything malicious. Cracker is a word which came along much later. In fact, it came along in the late 90s and suddenly people started claiming there was a semantic distinction.

      For anybody who was around before that, there simply is no distinction, and claiming it has always been so is a lie.

      "l337 h4x0rs" were who hacked your system, no matter if they just looked around, or burned it to the ground.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re: On the one hand ... by Ash-Fox · · Score: 4, Interesting

      For anybody who was around before that, there simply is no distinction, and claiming it has always been so is a lie.

      When I was browsing dial up BBSes back 1994, I remember the distinction being made, so this has been going on for a long time.

      Out of curiousity, how far ago (like what year, minimum) does the distinction need to be to not be considered a retroactive decision to re-define hacker?

      --
      Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
    4. Re: On the one hand ... by kevmeister · · Score: 5, Informative
      As someone who WAS there, working with the security community dealing with the Morris work in 1988 and the WANK worm shortly after and as the author of the first detailed analysis of WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) while at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I was there when the term "cracker" was born. I can credit folks like Russell Brand (not THAT Russell Brand) with the creation of the term.

      This was before the commercial Internet, before TCP/IP, and in a day when no one thought twice about having an open "guest" account on a system because computer security was not an issue. People who played around with computer code and modified system kernels, as opposed to those designing or writing them, were referred to as "hackers". We were professionals who did custom modifications to software and wrote tools to analyze them. At the time I had licensed access to the source code for a variety of systems of that day including AT&T Unix, RSX-11M, IAS, and VMS. Things like custom system calls, an un-delete command, code to allow a co-processor (FPS AP-120B) to directly access a computer's file system. These were what I was paid to do and I, like many I worked with.I called myself a hacker. I hacked code.

      When the first transmittable worms, viruses, and trojans appeared, the people who wrote them were also "hackers", but those of us who hacked code legitimately didn't much care to be lumped in with the bad guys, so the term "cracker" was devised. It never really caught on. To most people, hackers are bad guys. It's unfortunate, but the horse has left the barn, and is now dead and continues to be beaten to a rotten pulp.

      To this day, in the developer community the term "hacker" retains its original meaning, It's someone who hacks code, often to fix or work around limitations or bugs or to add new functionality. They still hold "hackathons" to work as a group on resolving very complex issues in open source projects and understand what "hacker" means in that context and just live with the fact that the general public has a slightly different idea of whet the word means.

      --
      Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
  2. The kid's got a bright future... by hyades1 · · Score: 2

    ...once they let him out of whatever Third World hellhole US intelligence is currently using to warehouse inconvenient people.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
  3. Incompetence by LichtSpektren · · Score: 2

    Our heads of national intelligence and security are easily compromised by remote hackers/social engineers. Sounds like a fairly big problem. Then again, our nation didn't complain too much when it was discovered that the Secretary of the Treasury either cheated on, or couldn't figure out, his taxes, so I guess this shouldn't be much of a shocker.

    1. Re:Incompetence by internerdj · · Score: 2

      How far up the management chain do you have to go in your organization before no one knows any of the technical details of what you do?

    2. Re:Incompetence by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      My experience? Two levels of org chart at most, often only one.

      The transition from "understanding technical details" to "kinda sorta understands the concept" is fairly abrupt.

      I once had a manager who had coded in JCL for about 6-8 months before he moved into management ... and that had been 15 years prior. He was mostly a sales guy who could give a demo, but didn't really understand things any more.

      At the C-level? They mostly know how to take the union of all possible buzzwords available to them and use them freely without actually knowing they're lying.

      Take the average MBA who works in tech? And they pretty much know nothing technical at all.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  4. It must be said... by hyades1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    This has all the earmarks of a Clapper-hacker Cracka Caper.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
    1. Re:It must be said... by Anubis+IV · · Score: 2

      Obligatory link for anyone too young to get it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  5. there are two potential outcomes. by nimbius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    outcome 1: Administration has as good laugh, invites teen to the whitehouse and a tour of the CIA. STEM and CS agendas are lauded and the teens intuition and cleverness are chamioned as a sterling mark of american ingenuity and creativity. peace in the middle east is championed as a fundamental necessity of the 21st century
    outcome 2: the teen spends half a decade in juvenile incarceration and another few years in a correcitonal facility after age 18. his parents find gainful employment hard to come by. as a convicted felon the teen loses access to PEL grants and scholarships required to attend college. everything from fast food to janitorial work refuses to hire a felon, and public assistance programs from section 8 housing to food benefits categorically deny him.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:there are two potential outcomes. by trybywrench · · Score: 3, Informative

      outcome 3: the CIA locks him in a room and throws away the room

      --
      I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
  6. lol, are you kidding? by CaptnCrud · · Score: 2

    They will probably offer him/her a job.

  7. So...this kid hacked Yahoo? by Gryle · · Score: 2

    Aside from his target being James Clapper, I'm not really sure what the fuss is. From my reading of the article, Cracka managed to re-route residential phone numbers and got into some Yahoo accounts. Granted, this isn't the greatest PR for the DNI and this kid is certainly more technically skilled than I am, but it's not like he compromised a classified system somewhere. Perhaps someone else with more technical expertise can explain to me what I'm missing?

    --
    Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
  8. Re:And well deserved by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2

    However hasn't Clapper said if you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn't mind your data being "public"? I'd say this might be a nice reminder that "public" may not be what you want all your data be, no matter how innocent you are.

    --
    The cesspool just got a check and balance.