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Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

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Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#41

Post by tptacek »

hugh wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(a) Because the people who pulled off the attack are stupid. (b) Because the people who pulled off the attack somehow lost access after getting the account but before archiving all the mail, and so made up the good stuff. (c) Because the people who pulled off the attack are very smart, and are going to slow-drip this out to the media over the next month. I know where my bet's at now.

If the people who pulled off this attack are very smart, then they'll be shutting up about it. The US Secret Service has a lot of resources and a pretty limited mission statement. It's not a good idea to attract their attention.

Give me a break. There are very few organizations less well equipped to respond to computer attacks than US law enforcement. It takes years to convict on computer crime cases, and almost every one of them is front page news in the trade press. You know how many we've had in the past decade?

Trivia question: which law enforcement agency was primarily responsible for responding to computer incidents throughout the 80s and 90s?

Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#42

Post by tptacek »

rms wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(a) Because the people who pulled off the attack are stupid. (b) Because the people who pulled off the attack somehow lost access after getting the account but before archiving all the mail, and so made up the good stuff. (c) Because the people who pulled off the attack are very smart, and are going to slow-drip this out to the media over the next month. I know where my bet's at now.

I'd go with a combination of (a) and (b) Seems like it was 4chan/Anonymous, unless it started in a super elite IRC channel and was slowly leaked to 4chan.

You underestimate the cleverness and persistence of a large group of bored internet trolls at your own peril. I am not kidding. Either that, or you've drastically overestimated the security of the Internet at large.

Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#43

Post by time_management »

This is indeed an epic fail... for, as it were, the Democrats.

Unfortunately, this only has the potential to help the Republicans. Let's assume the 98th-percentile scenario, from a Democratic perspective: a few mildly inappropriate emails are discovered via the hack. To us, meaning those who post on Hacker News, transparency and propriety matter a great deal, because we care about such "academic" issues. However, the average American (who spends 3 hours per workday surfing the internet, despite having signed an agreement that work computers were "for official use only") isn't going to be shocked or disgusted that a governor has sent a few emails in violation of propriety; it can easily be spun as a "one of us" crime, and the hackage will do nothing less than engender sympathy for Mrs. Palin.

Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#44

Post by [deleted] »

webwright wrote: post #28
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to repost stuff from Wikilinks here, but it looks like you're not correct: there's a transcript of the screenshots that includes things like, "CONFIDENTIAL ETHICS INVESTIGATION" and "REQUEST FOR DOCUMENTS". In addition to being a fuckup of spectacular proportions, it also corroborates an earlier news report of leaked emails that included specific instructions not to send sensitive government mails to Pa…

Ah, I'd just looked at the screenshots, not the text "log". Interesting that they'd screenshot all of the subjects that are totally personal/innocuous but the text log has all of the potentially damning subjects... Hrm. Why wouldn't you just scroll down and take a few screenies to prove the evil? I've worked on the technology side of a few candidates and politicians-- they are almost without fail moronic about techno…

[deleted]

Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#46

Post by froo »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #39

I got a lot of mixed feelings about this one. First -- it's a crime, plain and simple. Somebody should go to jail. Sites trafficking in stolen goods should be charged. Second -- glad it happened in September. Can you imagine something like this happening, only in the last week of the election? Heck, you could put any kind of flamebait stuff you wanted in the screen shots. It doesn't even have to be real. It could eas…

Third -- How was the system breached?

Dunno, I just went and quickly braved 4chan (I know... I feel so dirty) to see if anyone was linking anything. They had some rapidshare links up (a 1.4 mb and 1.1mb one).

Am grabbing now just to see what they are... I'm curious if there is anymore info on this.

Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#47

Post by jonknee »

comatose_kid wrote: post #24

I'm no fan of Palin, but I think it's pretty low of Gawker to gain page views by posting the contents of her personal emails, as well as the personal photos. Apparently privacy rights don't matter anymore.

If it was just personal emails you'd be right, but she broke the law and conducted state business with her Yahoo account. While it was reported before, this confirms it. I'd say since she routinely used her Yahoo account for state business it should be public, just like her main account.

Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#48

Post by hugh »

time_management wrote: post #43

This is indeed an epic fail ... for, as it were, the Democrats. Unfortunately, this only has the potential to help the Republicans. Let's assume the 98th-percentile scenario, from a Democratic perspective: a few mildly inappropriate emails are discovered via the hack. To us, meaning those who post on Hacker News, transparency and propriety matter a great deal, because we care about such "academic" issues. However, th…

Let's assume the 98th-percentile scenario, from a Democratic perspective: a few mildly inappropriate emails are discovered via the hack.

I'm expecting a bunch of things to be "discovered" in the next few days. Most will be fakes -- some obvious, some ambiguous. There might be some real ones mixed in there somewhere, but how are we going to know one way or the other?

In the end, everyone will believe what they want to believe.

Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#49

Post by mynameishere »

froo wrote: post #46
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #39

I got a lot of mixed feelings about this one. First -- it's a crime, plain and simple. Somebody should go to jail. Sites trafficking in stolen goods should be charged. Second -- glad it happened in September. Can you imagine something like this happening, only in the last week of the election? Heck, you could put any kind of flamebait stuff you wanted in the screen shots. It doesn't even have to be real. It could eas…

Third -- How was the system breached? Dunno, I just went and quickly braved 4chan (I know... I feel so dirty) to see if anyone was linking anything. They had some rapidshare links up (a 1.4 mb and 1.1mb one). Am grabbing now just to see what they are... I'm curious if there is anymore info on this.

It was a straighforward dictionary hack--her password was "popcorn".

Re: Anonymous hacks one of Gov. Sarah Palin's yahoo email accounts

#50

Post by quasimojo »

tptacek wrote: post #40
hugh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startup idea: ultra-secure webmail (accessed via one of those little physical key-generating token thingies). None of this "I've forgotten my password but here's my mother's maiden name" crap.

A startup that does no-frills, genuinely secure mail on hardened servers might in fact do pretty well. I've wanted one a lot lately. It's not an easy problem though; you're going to deliberately sacrifice features for security, a tradeoff most customers won't get. It won't solve this problem though; funnelling mail through Yahoo comes with plausible deniability. Funneling it through the email security vault, not so m…

doesn't change the vector of this attack one bit: weak password
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