Slashdot Mirror
How Hackers Broke Into John Podesta and Colin Powell's Gmail Accounts (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On March 19 of this year, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta received an alarming email that appeared to come from Google. The email, however, didn't come from the internet giant. It was actually an attempt to hack into his personal account. In fact, the message came from a group of hackers that security researchers, as well as the U.S. government, believe are spies working for the Russian government. At the time, however, Podesta didn't know any of this, and he clicked on the malicious link contained in the email, giving hackers access to his account. The data linking a group of Russian hackers -- known as Fancy Bear, APT28, or Sofacy -- to the hack on Podesta is also yet another piece in a growing heap of evidence pointing toward the Kremlin. And it also shows a clear thread between apparently separate and independent leaks that have appeared on a website called DC Leaks, such as that of Colin Powell's emails; and the Podesta leak, which was publicized on WikiLeaks. All these hacks were done using the same tool: malicious short URLs hidden in fake Gmail messages. And those URLs, according to a security firm that's tracked them for a year, were created with Bitly account linked to a domain under the control of Fancy Bear. The phishing email that Podesta received on March 19 contained a URL, created with the popular Bitly shortening service, pointing to a longer URL that, to an untrained eye, looked like a Google link. Inside that long URL, there's a 30-character string that looks like gibberish but is actually the encoded Gmail address of John Podesta. According to Bitly's own statistics, that link, which has never been published, was clicked two times in March. That's the link that opened Podesta's account to the hackers, a source close to the investigation into the hack confirmed to Motherboard. That link is only one of almost 9,000 links Fancy Bear used to target almost 4,000 individuals from October 2015 to May 2016. Each one of these URLs contained the email and name of the actual target. The hackers created them with with two Bitly accounts in their control, but forgot to set those accounts to private, according to SecureWorks, a security firm that's been tracking Fancy Bear for the last year. Bitly allowed "third parties to see their entire campaign including all their targets -- something you'd want to keep secret," Tom Finney, a researcher at SecureWorks, told Motherboard. Thomas Rid, a professor at King's College who studied the case extensively, wrote a new piece about it in Esquire.
Truly, only Vladimir Putin himself could have phished some cluser's Google password.
I was looking for the big argument about how Phishing isn't Hacking, and these guys shouldn't be called hackers!
Guess I'll have to wait...
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
A state-sponsered hack group wouldn't make that mistake, would they? Maybe Trump is right and it's just a 400-pound dude in his mom's basement.
Table-ized A.I.
imagine this, you are there in the internets and you go to your freaking gmail and WHAAAAAAAAAM!!!!! you get run over by a freaking lada (virus) and then the dashcam video surfaces on the wikileaks and that asshole assange laughs at you from a piece of exotic ecuador that SOMEHOW is in the middle of london
Phishing.
Looks like it's probably FancyBear hacking group that is responsible.
Therefore "it can only be Russians". There's no other possibility, not even aliens. /s
You can't handle the truth and you can't see the possibly classified evidence that may or may not exist. Trust us.
Idiots shouldn't use email. They'll click on any link in front of them. I see people like that every day and it makes me wonder how they even tie their shoes in the morning.
Is it a flaw in gmail?
Is it a flaw in the user's browser?
For IT geeks, that's the real question!
If the DNC, Podesta, and Media, State Department, DOJ, FBI, and Hillary camp did nothing wrong there would be nothing to expose.
It really truly matters little "who" did the hacking. DNC colluded with media to install a candidate of their choosing. Super-PACs are colluding with the DNC. Clinton Foundation is mostly a front for pay-for-play and benefiting Hillary. Hillary is not the mild tempered person the media has been trying to portray her as, lies to the public, and is in it for personal power. Nothing we didn't already believe but now we have validation.
It does not matter if it was Russia, a 400lb guy in the basement, or a disgruntled staff member (still my most likely suspect) the actions described in the emails are illegal.
Russia, guilty or not, is being used as a way to white wash the conversation.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
We have most URL shortening services blocked on our email system. It's a policy that has been in place for years - in email, it does not matter how long or ugly the URL is, it should be fully there.
If a service has a way to view the destination without actually going there, we MIGHT let it through. But even that policy needs review. Maybe we just need to crank up the SpamAssassin score by 10.0 for each one found...
Next we're going to hear they have weapons of mass destruction. We must attack now!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So the guy clicked on a link... that shouldn't constitute an entire hack of his account.
Did the link trigger a zero-day? What was the actual vulnerability they used?
That they sent a couple of bit.ly links that got clicked on a couple of times isn't surprising. The source claiming it's all the Russians is the same NSA source that perjured himself in front of congress.
Podesta uses the same password across every service he's on, and didn't even start changing it once his emails started pouring to the public by the thousands. It was likely exposed by a dozen other hacks.
If the Russian Government is as good at this shit as they say, why would they outsource it to a Russian firm? That's stupid.
It's like someone wanted a big sign that said RUSSIA DID IT.
Do the TLAs really thing that the Russian Government is going to fake them out by using a Russian firm? How incompetent are our cyber investigators?
so they 'Believe' it was Russia.
I guess it goes with their religiosity..
An acceptance of bunk as truth to justify a mindset.
How many stories have we had on this topic? :)
Lets go back down the stories and their new Bear related findings, spies, moles, data diodes and the private sector.
Starting with "How Hackers Broke Into John Podesta and Colin Powell’s Gmail Accounts"
https://motherboard.vice.com/r...
"It’s unclear why the hackers used the encoded strings, which effectively reveal their targets to anyone."
and finally "None of this new data constitutes a smoking gun that can clearly frame Russia"
So the first hint of something that is not very spy like?
Lets try the other link:
https://theintercept.com/2016/... (September 14 2016)
"https://theintercept.com/2016/09/13/colin-powell-emails/"
has "a hacker that many allege to have ties with Russian intelligence." and thats all.
Finally past the two slashdot links and down at
"How Russia Pulled Off the Biggest Election Hack in U.S. History" (OCT 20, 2016 )
http://www.esquire.com/news-po...
Lets keep reading past the 56k modems and 1950's see whats new.
"immediately discovered two sophisticated groups of spies" They are not great spies if they are "immediately discovered" by the private sector.
"soon able to reconstruct the hacks and identify the hackers." If the entry was so easy to reconstruct, it could be anyone with the skills.
"each of the attackers seemed unaware of what the other was doing" so more than one group used methods out in the wider public at random times?
Sounds like a few different groups are active.
So groups with "immediately discovered" methods must be the GRU and KGB?
"But several sloppy mistakes"... Do spies make so many "sloppy mistakes"? Use of their own language and emoji?
The Germans added their support to 'Fancy Bear" from years ago. Well understood methods by "different" groups that the private sector was well aware of?
The "hackers forgot to set" - that sounds like spies? Such a "rapid public reconstruction" and in public so the media could follow along?
Then onto the NSA, data diodes, and a small hint at a real spy could be in play with "an old-fashioned mole passed on the tools."
How did the other data get out? "Using commercial cloud services to "exfiltrate" data out"
So we are back to ip ranges? "Confident" in URL's and all that code litter that expert "spies" left for the media, private sector and "open-source counterintelligence" to find. Don't forget the easy to find emoji as part of the litter
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
> It's less than three weeks away, and no modern presidential candidate has ever come from this far behind at this late a date
I can't help but note how carefully this was worded so as to evade both Dewey vs. Truman and Brexit.
a short between the display and the keyboard or mouse.... Short of brains, short of operating security sense, and short of being clued in to any kind of security mindedness, but long on hubris.
And this from the people who ran a private E-mail server to do government business and are pretty close to winning the election for president.... Heaven help us...
This is only going to get worse due to ICANN's greediness. Is search.google valid? What about google.search, com.google, com.google.www, google.google, etc... We might end up being forced back into indexed-based search sites like when the web was young. If a search turns up all those URLs and they all have very similar looking content, there's no way for you to know which one is the site you want.
"he hackers created them with with two Bitly accounts in their control, but forgot to set those accounts to private, according to SecureWorks, a security firm that's been tracking Fancy Bear for the last year."
I does SecureWorks know whether they "forgot" or chose not to? This is Spy vs Spy stuff where nothing may be what it appears.
I'm skeptical; there are many gigs of emails, the upload would have taken quite a while. Our cyber security/network admins must really suck at the highest levels of government to not pick this up during that time. It's much more likely to be an inside job.
Listen and believe.
These are the idiots who are likely going to win the election, start a cyber war with Russia, and be privy to the innermost secrets of our government. And instead of resigning, Hillary goes on whining about it's all Trump's fault.
For Hillary, it's never Hillary's fault, it's always a Russian conspiracy, or a vast right wing conspiracy, or bad luck, or "I didn't do it", or ... WDATPDIM?
It's sickening.
..be THIS tall to use the fucking int4rw3bz0rz. idjits.
Because the target was running WINDOWS!
Even though these revelations may hurt certain politicians or parties, in the long run I think it is beneficial for everyone. In the past we would hear about a candidate like D.Trump that he helped poor women and children all his life untiringly, or that a competing candidate of the DNC, remarkably selfless one, is selected via popular vote, that our e-mails and browsers are secure, etc.
Now we know the truth. Yes, it is a bitter stunning truth, probably harmful truth, but it is the truth. And we could start to figure out what to do about it as grown up people, as opposite to deluded children.
In the Japanese language there are two words for reality. On is a reality as it seems, and another is the reality as it actually is. We need more of the latter and not only from the US.
I do not believe these were pure hacks. I am almost sure that there were inside helpers, individuals who want us to know the reality as it is.
The phishing email that Podesta received on March 19 contained a URL, created with the popular Bitly shortening service, pointing to a longer URL that, to an untrained eye, looked like a Google link.
I can sympathize with Podesta for not knowing much if anything about how the internet works, but is he so oblivious that he's never heard you shouldn't click any old link that lands in your Inbox?
Maybe Podesta and many other people just zone out when they hear the multitude of stories over the years about not trusting e-mail and not clicking on links you're unsure of.
He should at least realize that he's a high value target for hackers. He should at least have someone on his staff who would make sure he understands a few basic things to not fall prey so easily and it appears one of those things should have been to forward any e-mail relating to any computer-related issue no matter how legitimate looking to that person.
Maybe whoever set up his computer for him told him it was totally secure and he believed them.
Can we ever develop a kind of "herd immunity" from phishing attacks?
especially if your a public figure....
> ...believe are spies working for the Russian government.
Stop saying this. There is no proof, let alone any compelling evidence, that the Russians are orchestrating these hacks. If you believe this then you also believe North Korean hacked Sony, and a shitty anti-Mohammed movie sparked riots in Benghazi. They are lying to you.
White House Chief of Staff. yay
The law is not an ass. No really.
I really don't care how they did it, I'm just glad they did. The government is saying that Russia is interfering in the 2016 elections. Where the government says "interfering" I say "informing". I, for one, am glad they are letting us know just what kind of crap Clinton is trying to pull on us. I am glad that we finally have a first-hand peek at the underhandedness of our elected officials. I mean, if she tried this stuff before the election, just think about what she would feel privileged enough to try if she gets elected.
I hesitate to post this. Last week I was at a small meeting here in Austin, TX. The speaker was a former senior U.S. intelligence official. The meeting was open and I heard nothing that I thought was classified or very surprising.
In the question period a person asked if the Podesta email leak was done by the Russians and was Putin trying to elect Trump. The speaker's answer was that the intelligence community consensus is that the Podesta leak was probably Russian in origin (I’m not sure he said “Russian government”, which is an important distinction). To the “Elect Trump?” question, he said he thought electing Trump was probably not the goal. More likely the aim was to further reduce the American public’s already limited trust in U.S. governmental institutions.
Again, the meeting took place a week ago, I took no contemporaneous notes and I’m paraphrasing what the speaker said from memory, so take it for what it’s worth
All Podesta had to do is run his own e-mail server then none of this would have happened. No G-mail to hack.
Heh