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Spy Chief: Foreign Hackers May Be Targeting Presidential Candidates (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via NBC News: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned Wednesday that foreign hackers may be targeting the campaigns of U.S. presidential candidates. The FBI and Homeland Security are working with the campaigns to tighten security and prevent cyber intruders from penetrating their defenses, said Clapper. "We have already had some indications of that, and a combination of DHS, FBI are doing what they can to educate both candidates of potential cyber threats," Clapper said, without specifying which candidates they were advising. "I anticipate as the campaigns intensify we will probably have more of it." A senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that they are "most worried about Trump, who has no experience with government computer systems or protocols." Foreign hacking against American political candidates is nothing new, Clapper said. Prior to the 2008 presidential election, Chinese cyber spies had targeted the presidential campaigns of then Sen. Obama and Sen. John McCain in order to read emails and policy papers. The hackers successfully compromised some emails, including private correspondence from McCain, NBC News reported. Also, both Obama's and GOP candidate Mitt Romney's campaigns were hit by Chinese cyber-attacks during the 2012 election. The Office of the DNI clarified Clapper's remarks tweeting: "We're aware that campaigns and related organizations and individuals are targeted by actors with a variety of motivations -- from philosophical differences to espionage -- and capabilities -- from defacements to intrusions. We defer to FBI for specific incidents."
for some success for these hackers...
This reminds me of how Sarah Palin's email was hacked by a US citizen back in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Let's hope they catch them before the presidential election itself is over.
It's utterly inconceivable that the US presidential candidates could be tempting targets for hackers!
Foreign hackers are targeting everything, everywhere. Of course they're targeting political figures.
Prolly full of spicy Latinas
...water has been found to be wet...
...the Pope is Catholic...
...Bears really do shit in the woods, so long as the forest is their habitat.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Hackers commonly target important or rich persons. The FBI is aware of this. Details at eleven.
There are 2 kinds of people. Those who understand that literally anyone is a target for hacking by one interest group or another, and those that are clueless about the world.
The first category does not need to be warned, the second category does not let itself be warned.
So what is exactly the point of this warning? ( and by extension, this article)
Who could also target presidential candidates! It's absolutely shocking!
The solution, obviously, is to roll your own email server. Don't put it anywhere secure, someone's closet is OK. Read all your work-related emails on it, even the classified ones. It's a secret so it won't be hacked. If anyone finds out about it, try to laugh it off and claim partisanship is making other people persecute you. Heartily enjoy the warm feeling that comes from knowing you're above the law.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So senior officials are talking about how worrying Trump's lack of experience is. Isn't this the administration favoring some candidates? Is this legal in the US?
Another thing I find disturbing/intriguing is that political parties are private entities. Are the FBI and DHS available to help other private entities worried about their security?
n/t
Spy chief won't want to have any of that
His contention is that the *FOREIGNERS* are evil, and only *FOREIGN HACKERS* want to hack into our presidential candidates ...
The same spy chief, of course, never touch on the issue of the crappy security that one of our own presidential candidates have applied onto her private email server in the first place
Remember: FOREIGNERS are evil, FOREIGNERS are evil, FOREIGNERS ARE EVIL !!!
The kind of criminals that brought us the Pentagon Papers, and recently the Panama Papers, should most definitely be kept out of any systems associated with Clinton.
who has no experience with government computer systems or protocols
I seem to remember another candidate that seemingly has no experience with proper security protocol.
He won't put up with their bullshit. Clinton will just rollover. On her knees and want her belly scratched (among other things).
Quid quo pro, no?
They have national secrets?
Who cares if private individuals are hacked, obviously its a problem, but not because they are presidential candidates.
Blah blah FURRINERS blah blah HACKERS blah blah CYBER DANGER yadda yadda and nothing of substance or value was uttered the entire time.
Trump has multiple ppl that have been doing business dealing with Putin for several decades. Hopefully, FBI does these security checks instead of the USUI group that did snowden.
Windbourne
Non-biased legal experts say the related laws are convoluted and murky. After all, how many law makers do you know who can write non-ambiguous and meaningful laws on technology? Bigfoot is probably more common.
Table-ized A.I.
'The FBI and Homeland Security are working with the campaigns to tighten security and prevent cyber intruders from penetrating their defenses'
"The Department of Homeland Security today appointed a senior Microsoft Corp. executive to head a section charged with protecting the federal government's computer networks from cyber attacks." ref
"Overall, we identified 1,085 instances of high-risk vulnerabilities on the MOE [Mission Operating Environment]" ref
We have one candidate who's all ready put classified information on a Windows server with no firewall between it and the internet. And at least one hacker claiming he got in. But they are worried about the other one. I'm sure it has nothing to do with politics.
ah yes if foreign nation state actors werent hacking your polticos then they arent doing their job properely.
Hackers might do a little, but if we keep allowing our politicians to be bought and paid for by campaign contributions, foreign influences can alter our very laws. It isn't good to have the best politicians that money can buy.
However, I must admit that it's hard for me to imagine anybody specifically targeting me;
You in particular, as opposed to any other member of the human specie ?
Probably nobody is wasting the ressources, indeed.
(Though it's hard to be 100% sure).
On the other hand:
You, as in a member of a targeted group ?
(Say as:
- "an American who might be rich, so let's try to get as much personal data as possible, in order to try some identity theft/impersonation and see if we can empty their bank accounts"
- "a citizen, but there the 'one-in-a-million' chance that he might be an evil terrist, so let's siphon all on-line communication, to protect the interests of the gov^H^H^H democracy and freedom"
- "someone with a computer. maybe there's something of value stored on the computer, so let's encrypt everything and asks for bitcoin in exchange of the decryption key"
- "hey, there's a smartphone, syncing its photo database to the cloud! Let's try to break this and maybe we'll land on some pictures resellable to pornsites"
- "sniff, sniff,... do I smell badly protected credit card numbers in that database ?"
- "Hello dear Mr. Techno Vampire, I'm the son of the late King of Nigeria...."
- etc.)
You bet.
Happens probably way more time per day that you imagine.
Even if you don't have any classified information, you as an individual have several caracteristics which cause you to be lumped into the group targetted by various people in for the money.
Luckily for you not all of those semi-automated large-scale operation manage to succeed.
Unlucky for your those actually successful are most likely to go unnoticed - quickly swept under the rug - unless the target was a high profile (say: Sony's database got hacked yet again and millions of credicards numbers are up to grab on the darknet).
But yeah, you ARE definitely targetted, constantly. Just noboy sees you as a clear individual, more as a number on a long list of targets.
(Except maybe for the Nigerian Prince. This kind of scam tends to be a little bit more personal and targeted).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What part of "global internet" do you not understand?
Anyone! Anyone who makes the news is a target for the curious, irritated, or vicious.
Add in government-sponsored hacking and clubs like Anonymous, and it becomes a certainty that a natonal candidate
wll be the subject of searches and hacking.
Note that this goes for corporations, stars, activists, and politicians.
So is Mr. Clapper now going to admit that SECURING WEBSITES and SECURING DATA is a good thing... and to do that we need encryption, or is he going to try to weasel out by somehow pretending you can secure these things but still give law enforcement and hackers access?
Sooner or later these Washington mouths need to realize that what comes out of one side of their mouth undermines what comes out the other.
Long live encryption.
Ehud Gavron
Tucson AZ
" A senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that they are "most worried about Trump, who has no experience with government computer systems or protocols."
As opposed to Hillary's extensive experience of maintaining a secure platform to conduct official business ?
Technically, she had the experience and knowledge to conduct State Deparment business, she just chose to ignore it.
Of the two, I would be more concerned about Hillary who KNEW better, but elected to follow her own rules vs the established ones. ( There is a very good reason we handle classified info the way we do. )
For all of the alarm bells and billions spent I'll leave the totally feckless public outreach to do anything about it speak for itself.
They don't really care about helping U.S. based organizations not get owned they just care about scaring politicians into writing them bigger checks and passing more laws to retroactively make legal rummaging thru even more of everyone's shit.
Maybe if the candidates didn't lie so much about their policy, we wouldn't have to worry about those evil hackers exposing the real policy stances of these presidential hopefuls.
It would be interesting to know how much the spy chief is using the very great ability of the US to spy on political figures both foreign and domestic. All hail the secret police working hard to keep us safe from the horror of unrestricted democracy both abroad and at home.
I'm worried about Trump too, but possibly for very different reasons!
(Now serious question to the slashdot crew: this captcha thing is sentient, ain't it? I got "turbans" which in this context is downright scary)
As if the cia, nsa, and fbi cont try to dig up every bit of dirt they can on anyone in office.
my box is kept secure enough that it's probably not worth the bother of breaking into on the slight off-chance that there might be something valuable here.
It's not worth dedicating time of a pro hacker, to specifically find a way into your box, yes.
But it's worth every script kiddie's time to try generic attacks (like bugs of openssl that you haven't had the time to patch yet) against the target groups you appear in.
Again, you only are going to be a number on their list, not a concrete person, but they'll constantly deploy every trick in their sleeve to try to get at you (and at any other number on their target list against whom the trick-of-the-day happened to work).
Luckily, as you try as hard as possible to secure your box, you're getting hacked less frequently than your neighbours, and as you're more savvy than random users, you're more likely to notice when a hack succeeded.
Think of it a little bit as the locked door to your house. It's certainly not proof against government. If they want, they can take down the whole house.
But it's protected against random vandals that might degrade your property.
So it basically looks secure.
Until the day some burglar decides to pay a visit on the chance he might manage to steel something of value. His not targetting you personally, your house happened to be the one he targeted. You my get a guard dog, an alarm, etc. it is going to lower the chance of your stuff getting stolen, but there's always someone motivated enough with access to enough tricks and techniques.
The big difference between your house and the internet is the accessibility. A real-world burglar can only be in front of one house of a time. He can break into only one house simultaneously.
Whereas, on the internet, everything is simultaneously accessible to anyone. It's as if all the houses of the world were all in the same small street and every single wannabe theif could quickly move from one to the other.
The only real secure machine is turned of. And unplugged. And stored into a safe.....
But your practices are as close as possible to safe, while staying convenient.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
. . . I expect generic deploys of commodity platforms and low-bidder content.
So OF COURSE it's going to be hacked. And similarly, their people tend to be persuaded by the latest plastic fantastic gear, so they'll buy a "next-gen" firewall, fail to properly configure it, and then blame the firewall when they get hacked,
As for "foreign" hackers, with the plethora of botted boxes worldwide, J. Random Hacker could be sitting in Dubuque, Iowa, and the attack would look like it's coming from all over. . .
Clinton is a square shooter
This is NBC. They likely heard ten "intelligence officials" tell them Hillary would be a disaster before they found one who mentioned Trump. So they reported the Trump comment.
She has lots of experience being hacked by foreign nationals.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
While I agree with you the fact is that they will never believe that us the plebs deserve that level of protection and that by simply having it available means that you are a terrorist, pedo, commie, etc.
It is double plus good to have our information vulnerable and theirs secure. Their biggest take away from the Snowden mess isn't that they shouldn't have been doing illegal shit but that they need to better secure their illegal shit.
Time to offend someone
Addendum: here's a link to H's side of the "headers removed" saga:
http://hotair.com/archives/201...
Table-ized A.I.
I mean, really, the U.S. government is constantly manipulating foreign politics. If they can't take it, they shouldn't be dishing it out.
I'm really not worried about Chinese or Russian or Enemy-of-the-month-i-stani 1337 h4x0rs tracking what the US presidential campaigns are doing. I'm much more concerned about US government hackers monitoring who's involved with what political campaigns, and slightly concerned about campaigns and their totally-not-coordinated-with-the-campaign supporters' committees hacking each others' resources.
The biggest risk with foreign hackers isn't foreign governments tracking our political movements - it's foreign criminals compromising web pages, figuring that they'd be good targets, and if you're giving that $20 donation to some candidate who's not good at web security, they can redirect it to themselves.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In news today, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said something that is probably true.
Nobody believed him.
So why dignify *anything* he says with belief?