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Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

reuters.com

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Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#421

Post by thephyber »

leereeves wrote: post #386
pdpi wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security in depth. Even if you think you don't have anything particularly valuable in there, you still protect it as if you did.

I'd rather he worry about securing government secrets, not spend one second worrying about "personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum".

Bad take.

Patel specifically bypassed security clearance protocols for Bongino and other staff he hired. His top priority isn’t protecting government secrets — it’s to take down what he thinks is the part of the US government that resists bending to Trump’s will.

And you are wrong that the FBI shouldn’t care about securing the Director’s private life information. Anything and everything can and will be used to blackmail him by foreign governments, criminals, political actors.

I highly doubt the first public dump of messages would include the most compromising content — that’s like handing away a maximum severity zero day for the most common OS in the federal government. There’s no logical reason to do that for free, so I suspect the really incriminating/ salacious stuff was withheld for private use.

And if the FBI didn’t enable the high security setting on the FBI Director’s private email account, they might not have known what, if any, compromising materials were in there.

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#422

Post by alchemism »

edg5000 wrote: post #419
phtrivier wrote: post #408

I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference. But it feels million years away. It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level. Putting those people in charge was quick ; sure, a future administration could put them out quickly enough ; but how long will there be decently skilled people willing to take those position…

We'd have to look at the longest-running democracies and observe how they handled periodic refactorings

Well….they tended to collapse after a couple centuries.

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#423

Post by sysguest »

thephyber wrote: post #409
sysguest wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

woah but even I haven't heard about that gmail feature...? maybe google doesn't advertise about this much?

They absolutely advertised it when it was released and every journalist knows about it. Kashmir Patel went out of his way to bypass security protocols for onboarding his political hires (for the US’s premiere domestic intelligence service!). If he wanted to be secure, all he had to do was not get in the way of the FBI’s natural processes. Also, this wouldn’t have happened if POTUS had hired someone with relevant FBI…

> POTUS had hired someone with relevant FBI experience instead of a political hack.

well what percentage of highly-rated FBI people have actually enabled that feature?

did FBI had some internal recommendation to enable that feature?

FBI isn't NSA people...

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#424

Post by renegade-otter »

everdrive wrote: post #2

Interesting, and not all that implausible. The real test: his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news. It'll be interesting to see whether or not that bears out. If they wanted to maintain access, they certainly wouldn't celeb…

But his girlfriend, though...

https://www.tabletmag.com/the-scroll/articles/march-25-kash-...

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#425

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

leereeves wrote: post #412
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security through luck? The reality is that officials are targetted by various states looking to get some leverage, so not properly securing an email account is a serious failing unless it's part of a wider honeypot scheme. Personally, I'm not convinced that the current U.S. administration is competent enough to plan ahead and implement honeypots.

No point in going round and round with personal opinions and general speculation. The debate is easily settled: just point to some actual harm done by this hack.

I don't think you really understand how blackmail works. If the information is public, then that's a failed blackmail attempt. Also, the U.S. administration is unlikely to provide public information on how top officials have been compromised.

It's not really much of a debate as it's widely acknowledged that letting enemy states get access to the email accounts of officials is a really bad idea.

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#426

Post by razakel »

phtrivier wrote: post #408

I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference. But it feels million years away. It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level. Putting those people in charge was quick ; sure, a future administration could put them out quickly enough ; but how long will there be decently skilled people willing to take those position…

The coup has already happened.

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#427

Post by XorNot »

bobsmooth wrote: post #362
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every now and then something happens that makes me wonder how the fuck America is number one, this being one of them.

One of the largest populations, and by extension, GDPs.

Also the only major economy which didn't fight World War 2 on its own territory.

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#428

Post by thephyber »

leereeves wrote: post #404
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously government secrets need to be properly secured, but the personal info/photos of a top official can often be used for blackmail or for determining close friends that could be used to compromise Patel.

There's so much speculation about how this hack could conceivably be damaging, but so little evidence that it actually contained anything damaging.

“The enemy broke into our nuke silo, killed our Air Force manned crew, stole the nuke codes, launched the missile. Not a big deal because we shot it down before it hit its target.”

Most of the time, actual harm is the most important issue. In this case because that office holds so much centralized power and authority over many aspects of American life (domestic law enforcement, some foreign law enforcement, domestic counterterrorism / counterintelligence / counterespionage, and security clearance background checks for all VIPs), the means are equally as important as the ends.

And I would throw in a wrinkle: what evidence is there that the dumps were not stripped of the most useful blackmail material? If I were in charge of a hack operation, I would dump the low impact stuff to show the world how much of a joke this guy’s security is, but only after I already used the best stuff to blackmail him months ago.

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#429

Post by bergoid »

phtrivier wrote: post #408

I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference. But it feels million years away. It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level. Putting those people in charge was quick ; sure, a future administration could put them out quickly enough ; but how long will there be decently skilled people willing to take those position…

>I'd feel obliged to add some "but, her emails..." reference.

HRC's secret email server and the leaked Kash Patel emails couldn't be more different.

The first one is, in the words of a federal District of Columbia judge: "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency". [1]

The second one is the malicious leaking of some private emails. These emails are frankly none of our business (unless you are part of Kash Patel's family or friends).

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/clinton-emails-l...

Re: Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email

#430

Post by austin-cheney »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #14
everdrive wrote: post #2

Interesting, and not all that implausible. The real test: his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news. It'll be interesting to see whether or not that bears out. If they wanted to maintain access, they certainly wouldn't celeb…

I think this is actually the opposite of the correct conclusion—just look how influential Patreus cheating on his wife was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal ). I seriously doubt that Kash Patel doesn't have a bunch of skeletons to dust off and show the world; the man is a weirdo (much like the rest of the administration). EDIT: I actually misread the comment; I think we're likely in agreement. My bad.

Like what? We have two presidents, including the current one, that took multiple trips to a pedophile island. What skeletons could be greater than accusations of punching a child in the face after they bit the dude’s penis during forced sodomy?
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