201–210 of 502 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm. I did tech at the DNC in 2012. We pushed to get senior staff using 2FA and ran internal phishing drills. Obviously didn't take.
That's super annoying. The 100 person startup I'm at uses 2 factor authentication! It's so easy these days there is no technical excuse anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the real absurdity of this debacle to me. Many of the whitepapers that I read about the DNC hack listed the attack's "sophistication" as proof that it came from a state actor, yet it was the most routine, simple attack conceivable. No rootkits, no 0 days, just simple phishing and social engineering.
"Many breach announcements this year pointed to a “sophisticated attacker” as a narrative of their issue. This usually is followed up by criticism when an initial means of their compromise is revealed. Most breaches begin with spear phishing, commodity exploits, a leaked key, or some other obvious or preventable detail. However, this is almost never the “sophisticated” aspect of a breach worth talking about. It’s eas…
Everything I've read indicates the bulk of work was done by Powershell scripts, along with a backdoor process running in the open. If you told me that the backdoor was a kernel level rootkit or something similar then I could get onboard, but as it stands I don't think the attack's complexity is a solid argument for "Russia did it"
It seems unlikely that email hacking will stop in the future. If the leaked emails actually influenced the elections, it was because of their content. I've heard exactly zero credible claims that the leaked emails were falsified in any way. Perhaps if political candidates/party executives are going to do unethical/illegal things, they shouldn't discuss them over email. Edit: changed "zero claims" to "zero credible cl…
It's rather naive to think these things didn't have an effect. The problem isn't the truth of the claims, it's that the illicitly gained information was strategically released to disrupt one specific campaign, effectively destabilizing our election. Much like Comey's last minute email announcement revealed nothing new, yet allowed the email narrative to renew its currency in the last days of the campaign. Imagine if…
Unflattering leaks are part and parcel of Presidential campaigns, on both sides. It's why candidates get "vetted", meaning digging up as much dirt as possible in advance to see if it can be dealt with or if it disqualifies the candidate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politicians stand to gain government expansion when they scare the population. So it's not nearly as low of a bar as you think. It's like you're claiming we must trust pharmaceutical representatives from competing companies when they both agree that we all need more pills.
Who's expanding what part of government here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's super annoying. The 100 person startup I'm at uses 2 factor authentication! It's so easy these days there is no technical excuse anymore.
I'd be willing to bet the 100 person start up you're part of is largely of a different demographic than the parent's DNC staff group.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're ignoring the political context in which it was released. 1. Released the same day as the announcement of formal Russian Sanctions 2. Released the same day US made 35 "diplomats" (aka. known Human Intelligence Officers) Persona Non Grata. Which is a big deal. This type of document is not intended to "make the case" because we don't do that. Making a case for something by definition, would reveal sources and met…
It appears to confirm what we knew: the DNC's failure to adhere to basic security protocols, which would be enforced in any corporation with more than a couple dozen employees (edit: or not, see eropple's comment below), allowed its systems to be compromised by script kiddies (for political reasons, the USG insists these script kiddies are sponsored by the Russian government, and insists we take them at their word).…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did they really need to say, "We also have other data about the attack that we're not publishing because it's classified"? Isn't that kind of safe to assume?
When things like this are used as a pretext to sanction other countries, I will assume nothing and expect data. The bogus weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was enough to convince me that "just trust us" isn't sufficient data.
Folks, the point of this report is not to justify the punitive actions taken today. It is to provide information that companies can use to protect themselves against similar attacks in the future. So if you judge it by whether it "makes the case" against Russia, it will be lacking. We don't need 100 comments pointing that out.
You're ignoring the political context in which it was released. 1. Released the same day as the announcement of formal Russian Sanctions 2. Released the same day US made 35 "diplomats" (aka. known Human Intelligence Officers) Persona Non Grata. Which is a big deal. This type of document is not intended to "make the case" because we don't do that. Making a case for something by definition, would reveal sources and met…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The obfuscation used in the russian PHP shells looked awfully familiar I have seen similar obfusaction many times before. Generally most PHP backdoors look like eval($_POST['something']) and here eval is replaced with create_function (by the way I know several other functions that can be used instead of eval). This method of obfuscation (eval + gzip/base64_decode and other functions) is also sometimes used in legit…
>I have seen similar obfusaction many times before. If you look at it carefully you'll very quickly realize that you haven't. This isn't at all like your typical base64 silliness, and it's certainly very uncommon. This actually uses a cookie to decrypt the encrypted shell before executing it. Pretty obvious, but very few things actually do it.
https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2015/12/uncover...
Its been taught in my security class.