I’m getting pretty sick and tired of, and royally pissed off at Russia. I want to get our country back and throw some serious smack down on those assholes.
But, Dog forbid, we do anything to hurt the Russians’ feefees…
Well, since this happened under Obama, there’s at least a chance we took advantage of the opportunity to send them plans for self-compromising computer chips and engine designs that blow up after ten starts.
And here’s where the genius Putinites are really underestimating how badly they’ve fucked up. For a very long time, most people on the left, including the center-left, really didn’t want to get any ruckus going with the Russians. There were a lot of douchenozzle hipsters reading RT as if it was a legitimate news source for a while there and, hell, RT is still in a lot of cable packages. We turned a blind eye or stayed low drama over a lot of provocations and ignored their increasingly creative interpretation of nuclear arms control treaties because we just didn’t want to go back to all that Cold War anxiety.
And now, all that’s changed. Now, they have well and truly pissed off everyone from the center to to the point on the left where you get to the Greens and the people who still think Glenn Greenwald is a righteous dude.
We aren’t Ukraine. Putin really has no idea how bad things are going to start getting for him when we take the government back from his puppet regime.
Why hack?
Why not have Putin tell Trump what they, the hackers, would like to know?
Putin has many uses for Dances with Skunks, but would never bet his ass on him.
Indeed! And we’re not the only ones, Holland, France, Germany, Norway…holy crap did you see that story about the Norwegian guy just arrested in Moscow and accused of spying? That’s their usual fucking with NATO countries and O sending 300 troops to Norway to practice snow & cold weather combat just before he left. I love my world map in my office and as time goes on it is more and more disturbing to see things in a geographic sense.
But I’m with you, we are no Ukraine and when the time comes I hope we and other civilized nations make Putin wish he was never born.
The NRA is into hacking now?
Bad gun nuts, bad!
This sounds pretty much like the status quo to me. I would hope we’re doing similar things to them.
Russian (and Chinese) penetration testing and infiltration efforts aren’t even an open secret in the defense community - they’re simply how life goes. Some years ago, I worked at a relatively small defense contractor that simply shut the network down from 6p-7a local. That obviously wasn’t our only countermeasure, but attacking US systems is literally a nine to five job on the other side of the world. Why make it any more convenient for them?
Eff this lib-manufactured distraction. I want to know the progress of the treason charges against the mofos who wouldn’t stand and cheer for the President during the SOTU speech.
The timeframe doesn’t fit, and obviously I don’t know who has been behind recent hacking attempts at my own defense contracting office, but I have actually been surprised at how sophisticated some of the phishing emails have gotten. Every time an unsuspecting employee clicks one of their links or opens their attachment, the hackers gain enough information in order to further customize subsequent attacks. They’ve even eventually featured the official header and signature of C-suite executives, without many noticeable typos or odd grammatical constructions.
Unsuspecting employees? Yikes.
Oh well. That’s too bad. Nothing we can do I guess.
“I don’t know if I would say we are better prepared because the Russians will adapt as well,” Tillerson told Fox News Tuesday. “If the point is, if it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that. We can take the steps we can take, but this is something that once they decide they are going to do it, it’s very difficult to preempt it.”
But at least we can still have a parade to showcase our military might.
Personal accounts can convey snippets of classified information, whether through carelessness or expediency. They also can lead to other more valuable targets or carry embarrassing personal details that can be used for blackmail or to recruit spies.
This is really the key paragraph for people to understand. They don’t need to hack Lockheed or Raytheon’s systems themselves, they just need to ID someone who works there, search or brute force their way to ID their personal email and then hack their email through an easy phishing scam. There’s not much we can do on the consumer side other than continue to educate people about good online security practices (which should be a required yearly course for any corporation that manages other people’s data and/or classified info in any way) but the gov’t absolutely can take action to punish companies that don’t properly secure their data, train their employees and they can also punish groups and gov’t’s that let this type of theft go un punished.
Yes Yes Yes
And, according to all the Trump-Putin apologists, the THREAT of implementing the sanctions Congress voted for via Veto Proof Majority will totally make actual implementation unnecessary.
“…at my own defense contracting office, but I have actually been surprised at how sophisticated some of the phishing emails have gotten…”
I concede it’s easy to bitch from the sidelines, but this sounds like it might be mitigated by training. Warnings about issues like this can certainly be part of a morning meetings before everyone is off to his/her desk or monitor.
Maybe can’t prevent it entirely, but I’ve got believe it can help reduce the incidences of this.
As a civilian, I did not fall for my first phish because I had been warned.
I’ve got to believe that digital security people have more sophisticated suggestions than mine.
Thing is, the company sends out emails warning everyone about the phishing emails. After the last attack, they sent out a very stern email that explained the consequences to the company because of employees falling victim to the attack. They explain and warn and employees STILL fall prey to the attacks. I believe most people who work on direct contracts may have better intuition. I think many people who fail to identify suspicious emails are often indirect employees charging to overhead.
Yes, unfortunately. 
It’s not even like they haven’t been warned or told what to look out for.