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Washington Post Retracts Story About Russian Hackers Penetrating US Electricity Grid (washingtonpost.com)
Those anonymous U.S. officials who reported Russian hacking code had been found "within the system" of a Vermont power utility must've been surprised to learn the code was on a laptop that wasn't actually connected to the grid. The Washington Post has updated their original story, which now reports that "authorities" say there's no indication that Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. electric grid.
The Post's newly-edited version now appears below (with their original and now-deleted text preseved inside brackets). A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials. While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the discovery underscores the vulnerabilities of the nation's electrical grid... [Was "the penetration of the nation's electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability."]
American officials, including one senior administration official, said they are not yet sure what the intentions of the Russians might have been. The incursion [was "penetration"] may have been designed to disrupt the utility's operations or as a test by the Russians to see whether they could penetrate a portion of the grid... According to the report by the FBI and DHS, the hackers involved in the Russian operation used fraudulent emails that tricked their recipients into revealing passwords.
The Vermont utility does report that they'd "detected suspicious Internet traffic" on the laptop, but they believe subsequent news coverage got the story wrong. "It's unfortunate that an official or officials improperly shared inaccurate information with one media outlet, leading to multiple inaccurate reports around the country."
The Post's newly-edited version now appears below (with their original and now-deleted text preseved inside brackets). A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials. While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the discovery underscores the vulnerabilities of the nation's electrical grid... [Was "the penetration of the nation's electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability."]
American officials, including one senior administration official, said they are not yet sure what the intentions of the Russians might have been. The incursion [was "penetration"] may have been designed to disrupt the utility's operations or as a test by the Russians to see whether they could penetrate a portion of the grid... According to the report by the FBI and DHS, the hackers involved in the Russian operation used fraudulent emails that tricked their recipients into revealing passwords.
The Vermont utility does report that they'd "detected suspicious Internet traffic" on the laptop, but they believe subsequent news coverage got the story wrong. "It's unfortunate that an official or officials improperly shared inaccurate information with one media outlet, leading to multiple inaccurate reports around the country."
Here we go again. This reminds me of a boy, a boy who loved to cry wolf.
I will not believe this is true until Trump says it isn't a big deal.
You can't use your NSA to break in, spy, and sabotage industries, utilities, and governments, around the world. If you conduct malicious and damaging operations like you have for decades, expect that the world will respond.
Some organizations started to inject fake phishing emails into their communication systems. All employees who clicked get their heads bashed with a rock.
One laptop not on the network had malware.
Fuck the washington post.
http://boingboing.net/2016/12/31/no-russia-didnt-hack-vermon.html
Journalists wonder why people don't trust them, and this story is a good example. Turns out the crap was found on one laptop in the company's possession, which was not connected to their power grid.
(And when will companies/CIOs stop buying computers that contain so many exploitable vulnerabilities? I guess the answer is "Not until there's financial and legal consequence for their failure.")
Why is infrastructure on the public Internet ? It is not like the internet existed when most of the US electric grid was 'designed' and built. It worked quite well for 70 or so years without the internet. And I will say I have experienced more blackouts over the past 10 years than I did in total before 1990.
1980's are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back
"Gov. Romney, I'm glad you recognize al-Qaeda is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what is the biggest geopolitical group facing America, you said Russia — not al-Qaeda. And the 1980's are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back — because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.
So, which is it?
Security experts have been warning of possible foreign hacking for decades. But why this sudden spate of "Russia hacked X" stories now? Why not back when our Secretary of State was running an illegal, private, unsecured email server through which she transmitted classified information?
Simple: The Washington Post wanted Hillary to win the Presidential election, and reminding people how her action made it easier for Russian hackers to gain access to classified information wouldn't have helped her. But publishing it now helps support the false narrative that the Russians were behind the DNC leaks, not disgruntled Democratic Party staffers, and thus supposedly harms President-elect Donald Trump, whom the Washington Post and it's employees almost universally loath. That's the entire reason the story is being written and published now.
Further reading here and here.
What do you think the under/over is for MSM "Russian Hacking" stories between now and January 20?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I work for an information security company. All of us should really know better, and yet we do occasionally click the phish bait sent out by corporate security. After being caught once, we start being more careful - at least for six months to a year. I think it's a good idea. Corpsec doesn't need to really scold us or anything, just informing us "you clicked on a fake email" is enough to raise our awareness.
Russia is still not an existential threat to anyone but her former client states. This isn't a problem that Romney's larger Navy would have solved (and I'm surprised that Russian nationals and domestic rightists are so offended by this throwaway zinger 4 years later). But in retrospect, Obama underestimated Russia's guile. Rather than do catastrophic harm to the United States, Russia (like Al Queda) has done minor harm that led the United States do major harm to itself (the Iraq war, Trump).
Internal propaganda for the Democrats. Trying to prevent cynicism from setting in, but only working for the very dumbest most indoctrinated of them.
Seriously this was one laptop with some malware, found by a routine virus scan. It's the Washington Post, no credibility left except with the poor snowflakes that need to be constantly fed a reassuring yet terrifying narrative.
The worst thing about these kinds of efforts, it leaves the Democrats with their army of chanting morons, but those with two working brain cells still fall away. It will serve as its own punishment.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"... the US's general posture in the world is wildly preferable..."
The U.S. government has many secret and semi-secret agencies. No one, literally no one, knows all of them, or which are badly managed. As we've seen, the secret and semi-secret U.S. government agencies often hire outside consulting companies that often have areas of sloppy management.
The U.S. government is, by some measures, such as money spent, the most violent in the world.
The U.S. government has killed, or caused the death of, an estimated 11,000,000 people since the end of the 2nd world war.
War is extremely profitable for some corporations. See the book, House of Bush, House of Saud, by Craig Unger. Bush and Cheney started a war that was profitable for them.
The U.S. has the largest percentage of its citizens in prison, of any country, in any century. The prison system is hugely profitable for prison corporations. Two of the many articles:
ACLU: With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of the world's prison population.
ThinkProgress: The United States Has The Largest Prison Population In The World -- And It's Growing.
The headline is complete bullshit. Can the author not even read? The grid was not penetrated, hacked, or comprimised. No report says it was. This is totally a fabrication from the reporters.
"We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems."
In any event Trump thinks he's smart, but he's not
Or perhaps he is. A great real estate developer and dealmaker who has managed to make bundles of money while leaving other investors with the losses from his failed ventures. If you are trying to close the deal on a shithole condo with leaky plumbing in a bad neighborhood, you don't insult prospective buyers. You butter them up by telling them how great they are.
The jury is still out on Trump. But I wouldn't write him off yet.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why so sarcastic? Just about every programmable system can be broken into, and it's not management who develop these systems but private companies. As long as companies aren't held accountable for their lax security, problems like this are never going to be fixed, no matter what 'management' wants or tries.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos Explains Why He Bought The Washington Post.
In my opinion, a good indication of Jeff Bezos's management ability is any Amazon web page. Amazon web pages distract you from buying something by trying to sell other things.
No pun intended but this comes as no surprise because the software being developed was outsourced to India or H1B Indians whom just aren't good software engineers. This fiasco could have been avoided if these energy companies had employed the highly skilled and qualified people in the United States. I personally have been tasked with cleaning up garbage code full of memory leaks that was churned out by WiPro.
Compared to how many deaths by the Russians? By the Germans? At this point, I don't think any country with any sort of history measured in centuries can claim the high ground on violent acts.
Then you follow with non-sequitur alarmist speak. How are you different than Alex Jones again?
Beyond the obvious fact that you are overlooking Russia's nuclear stockpile, your analysis of US-Russian Naval warfare seems delusional at best. A larger surface fleet was never the answer to the Russians that never focused on that to begin with. It's not our super carriers that matter as much as our ASW capacity.
Like many things... it's not how big it is but how you use it.
Furthermore, our current crop of Destroyers aren't a threat to anyone. Not even Cuba.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Watching the video "Why We Fight" explains a lot of this.
Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex.
Now both parties are dependent upon war for a successful economy.
Notice we're still in Afghanistan.
Why?
Fact is Trump made a deal with Putin. Win me the election and will sanctions.
No, that's not a fact. It's pure conjecture.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Now both parties are dependent upon war for a successful economy.
Nonsense. Peacetime military spending has never been an issue for us.
Notice we're still in Afghanistan.
Because the Taliban were stronger than the "moderate" forces in Afghan society, and still are. We can't fix Afghanistan without resorting to draconian cultural imperialism (*real* cultural imperialism, not the SJW buzzword); we can only play for time and hope it somehow fixes itself.
This is largely due to the influence of conservative Islam and Islamism, but there are also some complex intersecting issues with the war on drugs, warlordism and interactions with Pakistan, itself an extremely fucked-up country with fucked-up rulers whom we prop up because we don't want nukes to fall into the hands of people who would actually use them.
Fact is Trump made a deal with Putin. Win me the election and will sanctions.
No, that's not a fact. It's pure conjecture.
Don't we now live in a post-fact world? WSJ editor-in-chief Gerard Baker says that stories will *not* call Trump a liar as this is "too partisan" but will merely investigate his claims and post those stories separately for readers to make up their own minds.
However, the WSJ has had no qualms in labeling Edward Snowden a liar in several stories.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Oh yes, Somebody made deals with Putin, but you're thinking of the wrong guy.
sig: sauer
Hey Editor David, instead of covering up your ignorant original posting of this article by changing the headline with no explanation, how about just posting a new article. Now people are confused at comments below pointing out the erroneous headline which should have never been put here to begin with if you'd just tried a little to validate it.
If you were out to cripple the US electric grid, would you really start with an office computer in small municipal power company (fewer than 20000 customers) in the middle of nowhere?
Why not? You have to start somewhere, and the best place to start is often where people assume is not a good place to start. When Israeli and US intelligence decided to take down Iran's air-gapped uranium centrifuges, they started with the least likely entry point imaginable: they infected the whole damned world, hoping that eventually Stuxnet would get to a machine used to program the PLCs in Iran's centrifuge controllers. And it worked.
In comparison office machines in a minor utility are practically a surgical strike on US electricity infrastructure. Or possibly the start of one.
The path to success in attacking a hard target is full of dead ends. But that wouldn't deter a national intelligence agency. This was a case of sloppy reporting -- jumping to conclusions. But if the malicious code was put on an electric utility machine by Russian intelligence you have to assume that the grid is at least one of their ultimate targets. Intelligence agencies are willing to spend years infiltrating and undermining organizations if the payoff is large enough.
So while this was not the hair-on-fire situation it was portrayed as, it's not a "meh" situation either. This is something people should take seriously.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's about the most lame "retraction" I've seen to a fake news story. The entire central premise has been destroyed, but 98% of the article remains unchanged. That's not a retraction. Also of note:
Original Slashdot headline:
Russian Hackers Penetrated The US Electricity Grid, Say Officials (washingtonpost.com)
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday December 31, 2016 @10:34AM from the power-play dept.
blah, blah, fake story
Conveniently, now Slashdot now doesn't have that lingering headline showing they fell for this idiocy as well. I thought I'd just post it for posterity here.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
except Israel's. Not saying that's a reason to throw 'em under a bus, but it's also no reason to support their interests over anybody else's.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When will the Government start shutting down Fake News sites like the Washington Post?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Our forces split the Shia, Kurd, and Sunni into separate militias and armed each of them. I won't use the word 'deliberately' because it's irrelevant. Whatever influence you think we're having in the world, you're wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...with an altered headline and act like they never fucked up in the first place? Fake news reporting fake news.
Given the intelligence of the typical Washington Pest reporter, this really shouldn't be a surprise:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
You're not. It's become so blatantly Republican/Russian (Republissian?) that I come to this site to see what the Trump-camp talking points are for any given situation.
Just like leftist media, you are attempting to slander people because you can't win the argument. Democrats ran a horrible candidate, much worse than the Republican. Russia did not make the Democratic party push Hillary into the mix, behave questionably (at best) even with their own party members, to prop her up as the candidate. The Democratic party did this all on their own, and it failed. Pick a better candidate, a better platform, and try again next election.
Republicans, even Trump, is not for Russia, and your conflation makes you just as bad as CNN or any other crap media outlet spreading BS because their "chosen" candidate lost. Republicans like America, and just like Democrats of a couple decades ago, push for Americanism. The ideology being pushed by Trump matches much of Kennedy and other Democrats and Republicans. Peace through Strength is not a Trump thing. Negotiating with countries we are not necessarily friendly with is also not a Trump thing (Look at President Obama for pity sake). Populism and Nationalism are centuries old ideologies.
Now, as to why so many people here are now "Republican", at least in leanings, has much to do with age. The older people get, the more they tend to be conservative in their political views. The Democratic candidate, and the media handling of her, probably accelerated countless people into the Republican camp. That, and the fear most Republicans have of posting in public has been largely diminshed.
It's really a shame that instead of having dialogue and being accountable, the Democratic party and media simply slander everyone who disagrees with them. You AC, are included in that shameful act.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You mean it should have been Russian Hackers Failed to Penetrate The US Electricity Grid, Say Officials? No retraction needed then and the scarefactor is still good.
yeah that was a bad troll. i mean. we werent playing a game where popular vote matters, thats like saying the winning world series team lost too, because the losing team actually had more runs (or hits, or fans in the stands or any other irrelevant point that has nothing to do with the actual rules)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Did anyone bother to notice that this entire thread is based on an inaccurate assertion? The story was NOT retracted. It was CORRECTED - meaning that a piece of inaccurate information in the original story (about the laptop being connected to the ICS/SCADA system) was rewritten to clarify that the computer was not connected to that part of Burlington Electric's network. A retraction would mean WAPO removed the story from its website and disavowed its contents. No such thing happened. In fact, you can still read the story using the link provided in the Slashdot post - a sure sign that it HASN'T BEEN RETRACTED!!! Slashdot should probably RETRACT the incorrect story about the Washington Post's (non-existent) retraction.
Fact is Trump made a deal with Putin. Win me the election and will sanctions.
No, that's not a fact. It's pure conjecture.
Don't we now live in a post-fact world? WSJ editor-in-chief Gerard Baker says that stories will *not* call Trump a liar as this is "too partisan" but will merely investigate his claims and post those stories separately for readers to make up their own minds.
However, the WSJ has had no qualms in labeling Edward Snowden a liar in several stories.
Sure. Who's surprised that the WSJ editorial team has double standards? Hardly shocking - in fact it's how newspapers everywhere have always operated. It's pretty much how language has always operated, particularly if you accept some of the less naively instrumental theories of language like Toulmin's or Davidson's.
And I think Trump's a loathesome narcissist, bully, and con man.
But as far as I'm aware, there's no compelling, or even mildly persuasive, evidence that he "made a deal with Putin" to "win ... the election". For that matter, I don't think Putin was capable of delivering the election, or that Trump needed his support. Trump won because he carried the states everyone expected him to carry; he won Florida[1]; and he won the "defector" states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan[2], and Wisconsin.
Why he won all those also seems pretty clear: populist demogoguery that appealed to antiestablishmentarianism, contrarianism, xenophobia, and general disconnection; a smaller but vocal cadre of middlebrow right-wingers who either believed his vague promises of business liberalization and social conservativism or anticipated that he'd delegate everything to right-winger lieutenants;[3] an even smaller bunch of Powers That Be who bet that he'd reward them;[4] some demographic factors; and gerrymandering, though that's an easy target that attracts more blame than it deserves (and blaming it doesn't do much good anyway).
Is Trump's win good for Putin? Very likely yes, though to be honest Putin would likely have been pretty pleased with a Clinton win as well, since continuing the current tensions would have served to keep his popularity up. Putin's a deft strongman and the Kremlin is adaptable. Really, sowing FUD about the election is probably all Russia wanted, since it distracts from more important issues and rallies nationalism at home. And they got that - in spades.
The OP's claim that Putin delivered the election to Trump just plays into Putin's hand. Focusing on things we do have evidence of would be much more productive.
[1]The Florida results seem to me pretty likely to be an accurate reflection of the actual popular vote, at least in terms of the overall winner. It wasn't another 2000.
[2]It's really not clear that he actually won Michigan, where the difference in the official count was well within the margin of error and the recount was halted early; but it makes no difference to the overall election. Trump still wins without Michigan's votes.
[3]That bet appears to be pretty safe, judging from Trump's cabinet nominations and the abundant evidence that he doesn't care to do the day job, whatever his day job supposedly is at the moment. If it's not something splashy that feeds his narcissism, he's not interested.
[4]Goldman Sachs executives, for example. Or the folks running Carrier, who just got a big reward from that tool Mike Pence for only eliminating many of the jobs at their Indiana facilities.
Fine, we can call it what it really was, which was political propaganda. How else do you explain that a single laptop getting infected with malware gets elevated to the level of national news?
And no, this wasn't a simple mistake. A simple mistake is getting a name or peripheral fact incorrect, and we can forgive that so long as corrections are made, because we're all human, and all make mistakes. Rather, the entire premise to the original story was shown to be false, but the story still remains in almost its entirety. Not a single call to Burlington Electric was made prior to publishing... the simplest, most basic fact checking you'd expect of a professional journalist or organization. Quite simply, this was journalistic malpractice. Only one of two possibilities seem likely - either the WaPo organization is simply incompetent and doesn't understand how to do proper journalism, or they rushed the story out because they had their eye on a political narrative they wanted to push, and facts be damned, this couldn't wait. This is not the first time they've been caught doing this either, when they promoted an absurd "fake news blacklist" with questionable sources a bit over a month ago.
Even some thoughtful left-leaning journalists are having a hard time swallowing these latest reports about Russian hacking, as they're all too aware of how governments are perfectly willing to lie when it suits their purpose (on both sides, mind you). All I ask is that you look at these reports through the lens of a skeptic, and ask why these stories are getting pushed to the front of the newsfeed. And what has changed so that so many people are willing to believe our three letter agencies without question, when they've been caught in lie after lie after lie these past many years? Why the change in heart when it comes to these Russian hacking reports, and subsequent stories that seem to neatly dovetail into that line?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.