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Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

nytimes.com

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Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#31

Post by EugeneOZ »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #11
kkl wrote: post #3

I am under the impression that attribution is a very difficult and often impossible process. If that is true, what is the point of including "Russian" in this headline? I would guess the most probable response would be something involving "fulfilling a narrative." Even if that is true, what makes "Russian" hackers more exciting then just "Hackers?" I am not trying to pose some profound question. I am genuinely confus…

> what makes "Russian" hackers more exciting then just "Hackers?" It's all about what ultimately happens to the information harvested. If it's some kids in mom's basement doing it for lulz, that's not very concerning. But, presumably, Russian hackers, even if not actual Russian government employees, would pass on useful information to their government. Even if non-classified, that could be very damaging to national s…

Russian hackers (and most of russian programmers) don't support current government and would never give such important information to government. This title is just part of the information war. In Russia government is trying to create image of "cruel Americans", so maybe it's the try to make something similar from USA side. Or not :)

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#32

Post by bcg1 »

NN88 wrote: post #13
kkl wrote: post #3

I am under the impression that attribution is a very difficult and often impossible process. If that is true, what is the point of including "Russian" in this headline? I would guess the most probable response would be something involving "fulfilling a narrative." Even if that is true, what makes "Russian" hackers more exciting then just "Hackers?" I am not trying to pose some profound question. I am genuinely confus…

Did you ever think the government knows more than it can tell you?

Did you ever think the government tells you more than it can know?

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#33

Post by dataker »

I hope legislators, if anything, become more careful with foreign intelligence, not innocent citizens.

This unfortunate announcement is one of those things lawmakers love to use to justify exploitative and unethical policies.

Let's hope that's not the case

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#34

Post by flatline »

derefr wrote: post #5

Sounds perfectly alright to me. Remember that there are levels of classification. Unclassified (the lowest level) could be running through Gmail in plain text for all anyone at the White House cares. Anything of even minute importance will get a classification status. (Also, Re: the NSA—they do the government's COMSEC , securing the classified data. OPSEC, the risk/reward policies regarding what data should be classi…

Actually there are various sub-designations for unclassified material[0]. Just because it's unclassified does not mean it's not confidential, or problematic if certain individuals have access to it. The burden of classifying all communications would be too great, too restrictive. Everything electronic would have to be over classified networks, leaks would have to be handled appropriately, and nobody could ever have a public conversation about anything. Doesn't mean everything should be plaintext in gmail though.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_but_unclassified

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#35

Post by justcommenting »

In terms of root causes, this incident should cast a spotlight on NSA/IC strategy and the balance between "Information Assurance" goals and SIGINT goals: is the NSA going to deliberately leave everyone vulnerable (including, apparently, POTUS) to enable offensive operations of questionable value, or should NSA and its partners re-emphasize their IA mission and work toward securing the systems everyone uses? I can only hope Obama is leaning toward the latter after being personally affected.

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#36

Post by austenallred »

yzmtf2008 wrote: post #28

Just quoting some of the comments on NYTimes: > Am I the ONLY one who has a hard time believing that these hackers ONLY got "unclassified" stuff? Riiiiiiiiight. They just don't want us to know how deeply in these folks got. Why would they just get "unclassified" stuff? > Only unclassified emails. Right. Do people even read articles these days?

>Do people even read articles these days?

I know what you said is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but as someone running a news startup there are two types of news consumers:

1. People looking to understand what's happening 2. People looking for ammunition to reinforce their already-unstoppable notion as to how the world works.

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#37

Post by OliverJones »

The NYT article doesn't have many tech details. It would be interesting to know whether it was ineptly configured and managed. Was this a dusty old server in the cellar running unpatched Windows 2008 and an old version of Exchange, or was it a hardened and well-managed system?

Somebody on Computerworld said that the State Dept was spearphished, and that POTUS's system was breached from there.

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#38

Post by out180 »

vinhboy wrote: post #15

I always wonder how these hackers know which IP range to attack. Is it just like a hit and miss kinda thing? Or do they have insiders who leak those info to them.

Actually, it's not that difficult. The v4 blocks assigned to DoD are quite well known, but that's a pretty large swath by itself (/8's), so one would want to tighten the target a little. That's not a hard task at all.

If you wanted to figure it out starting with something like whitehouse.gov is a bad place to begin. That's a public facing media engine at best, not really used for "government" per se. In fact, it's likely not even homed on a DoD or GOV network. Many of the media engine type sites in the government are outsourced to third party hosting.

You'd want to find something more specific, like perhaps a protected access web system, like a Sharepoint portal or website, or even a mail relay conveniently pointed out by an MX record. Trace that system back and you likely will find either its reverse proxy, a front end system, or an SMTP entry point. This gives you the parameter subnet (DMZ) that you can probe from there. Then, using available DNS records, you could start mapping out the parameter looking for proxies, mail relays, and web servers. If you had access to web traffic logs you could use them as well to look for egress points from networks. If you had e-mail traffic to look at you'd likely see leaked internal subnets as well in the headers. However, this would only work for services they have blessed for access to the public internet.

It is absolutely no different than how you'd map any other network.

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#39

Post by brosefstalin »

dmix wrote: post #23
saraid216 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: hackers are never American citizens somehow. It's 'cuz Americans are all model patriots. Obviously.

Well to be fair, America is one of the few countries really really good at catching hackers. So I doubt many citizens ever bother. Case in point: when was the last time you heard Russia/China arresting a hacker?

"I don't know about it so it doesn't exist."

Re: Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

#40

Post by dredmorbius »

mikecb wrote: post #16
CamperBob2 wrote: post #2

Hello, National Security Agency: Preventing this sort of thing is your job. Once you're done snarfing up my personal data, perhaps you could attend to it.

These networks would be under the white house communications agency, a subset of the defense information systems agency which is not affiliated with NSA. Supposedly his blackberry is run through NSA (See, e.g., the fishbowl project), and was not implicated in this breach.

Point missed.

It's not that it's the President's email that's vulnerable. It's that _all_ people's email is vulnerable.

Some of those people are key to national security, many aren't. But they all deserve privacy and protection.

And yes, one of NSA's mandates is to secure U.S. communications:

"The Information Assurance mission confronts the formidable challenge of preventing foreign adversaries from gaining access to sensitive or classified national security information. "

https://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml

It's not just the President the NSA are failing.

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