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Arrests Made After Group Hacks CIA Director's AOL Account (washingtonpost.com)
Slashdot reader FullBandwidth writes:
U.S. authorities have arrested two North Carolina men accused of hacking into the private email accounts of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials. [The men] will be extradited next week to Alexandria, where federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of Virginia have spent months building a case against a group that calls itself Crackas With Attitude... Authorities say the group included three teenage boys being investigated in the United Kingdom.
The group used social engineering to access the email accounts of John Brennan, the director of the CIA, as well as the Director of National Intelligence, and former FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, according to the article. One exploit involved "posing as a Verizon technician and tricking the company's tech-support unit into revealing the CIA director's account number, password and other details." An FBI affidavit alleges that a British teenager named "Cracka" also began forwarding the calls of a former FBI deputy director "to a number associated with the Free Palestine Movement," while "D3F4ULT" paid for a campaign of harassing phone calls. In addition, "According to the affidavit, Cracka appears to have gotten into the law enforcement database simply by calling an FBI help desk and asking for Giuliano's password to be reset..."
"One member told CNN [In a video interview] that he smoked marijuana 'all day every day' and was 'probably' high when gaining access to high-level accounts."
The group used social engineering to access the email accounts of John Brennan, the director of the CIA, as well as the Director of National Intelligence, and former FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, according to the article. One exploit involved "posing as a Verizon technician and tricking the company's tech-support unit into revealing the CIA director's account number, password and other details." An FBI affidavit alleges that a British teenager named "Cracka" also began forwarding the calls of a former FBI deputy director "to a number associated with the Free Palestine Movement," while "D3F4ULT" paid for a campaign of harassing phone calls. In addition, "According to the affidavit, Cracka appears to have gotten into the law enforcement database simply by calling an FBI help desk and asking for Giuliano's password to be reset..."
"One member told CNN [In a video interview] that he smoked marijuana 'all day every day' and was 'probably' high when gaining access to high-level accounts."
To divert attention away from Russia?
What's more concerning... That the director of the CIA had his account hacked, or that he has an AOL account.
While it is always worthwhile to prosecute the hacker, the real question is how is it possible that the Director of the CIA was hacked? Massive incompetence in the CIA is the only possible explanation.
[The men] will be extradited next week to Alexandria.
Holy crap, why are they sending them to Egypt?
I used to think that the only reason someone would want their own e-mail server would be to try to erase a central record of sent e-mails should the need arise, but after reading this summary I see that there is merit in not entrusting a third party's low level tech support person with the ability to either read or reset your password.
In other news, Verizon knows its users' passwords? Let me guess -- they're stored in plaintext.
Posing as a technician to get passwords - what?
Law enforcement database for managing private e-mail accounts - what?
I mean this shit could all just be made up to cover up the more embarrassing things they actually did, because if security were so lax as this story claims, every hostile nation would have pretty much everything on all high ranking intelligence officials.
Has an AOL account ?
Come on what does he use for personal information ? Myspace ?
While it is always worthwhile to prosecute the hacker, the real question is how is it possible that the Director of the CIA was hacked? Massive incompetence in the CIA is the only possible explanation.
This came up and was discussed on Schneier's security blog.
In this instance the CIA director did nothing wrong. He had a strong password, didn't let it out, and had no sensitive information on this particular personal account.
The hackers convinced AOL to to do everything on behalf of Brennan, without his knowledge or consent. All the security "best practices" in the world won't help if you can convince someone at the ISP to let you in.
To his credit, Brennan used this account for personal purposes, and apparently there was absolutely nothing of a sensitive nature there.
> every hostile nation would have pretty much everything on all high ranking intelligence officials.
Would it be worth it to China to spend a million dollars trying all sorts of ways to get into the President's email, or the secretary of state? Of course it would. If the
I accidentally hit submit before I was done writing.
> every hostile nation would have pretty much everything on all high ranking intelligence officials.
Would it be worth it to China to spend a million dollars trying all sorts of ways to get into the President's email, or the secretary of state? Of course it would. If they tried hundreds or even thousands of different hacks, would they eventually get lucky? Sure, probably.
Therefore they probably have tried thousands of times, and eventually been successful. I would be suprised if after all that trying they never succeeded. Once they got a toehold, it's relatively easy to expand access.
1996 called ...
Has an AOL account? Jeeze, that just about says it all doesn't it?
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Calm the fuck down, Mr. Clapper. We'll get you a car. Just relax, will you? There are microphones around.
Director wasn't conned, his service providers were.
This sounds suspiciously like part of the story in Hackers.
The article says there were sensitive files stolen from his personal email account. If true, he shouldn't have had them there.
Whoosh.
He probably has bills to pay and family to keep up with like every other person out there.
And that's fine, but all of the sensitive attachments he forwarded from his government account to his AOL account are a pretty damn serious matter. Brennan was definitely not just using his AOL email account to pay bills and see if his brother wanted to play golf on Sunday.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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"Probably because it was mostly the white countries that enslaved or "colonized" all of the non-white people from other countries over the last few hundred years.}
"
I guess you missed The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
They did plenty of conquering and enslaving in the 30's and 40'e
And they are still not 'diverse'
For a government official to use an AOL account for anything should be a criminal offense.
Hey, AOL is for serious work. Shut up!
- Colin P.
Table-ized A.I.
It's right up there on top. The sentence with "cia director" and "aol account". That's impossible.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I said the same thing at first, but if you think about it, its brilliant. When the KGB tries to hack into his personal account, they see it is an AOL account and say, 'Neyt comrade, you are mistakekink. Thees coold not be direcktors account, only retarded child use AOL account. Must be, how you say, hunny pit? Ve keep lookikink elsever.'
These CIA guys, always throwing fucking curve balls. They are like, Inception deep.....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I work at a large finnish ISP. We employ a very simple method to avoid problems with impostors trying to reset account passwords and the like, we do not, under any circumstances, reset the password on the customer's behalf. The customer has to do it him/herself. In theory, we are not forbidden from resetting a password, but we are (under penalty of immediate termination) forbidden from giving up the new password to anyone via any form of communication. The customer has to do the resetting him/herself via the account management page.
If the customer has forgotten the credentials to the account management page, he can get into it using his standard 2-factor online banking authentication (in Finland, ALL banks are part of this system and many public and large private services utilise the provided auth API for authorisation), Yes, we understand older clients might find this inconvenient, but no amount of yelling and screaming is going to make any of our reps divulge a password directly. If the customer can't find the account management page or navigate it, we an offer a remote desktop connection to caller's computer and help them with that, but the caller still has to authenticate, we just show them what links to click and where.
CIA! Freeze!
The group used social engineering to access the email accounts of John Brennan, the director of the CIA, as well as the Director of National Intelligence, and former FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, according to the article. One exploit involved "posing as a Verizon technician and tricking the company's tech-support unit into revealing the CIA director's account number, password and other details.
That IT department (in CIA/FBI) should be fired. Everyone knows that there is no reason for Verizon to ask for any passwords. If they were that easily socially engineered, I'm seriously afraid for this country.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!