The Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the National Institutes of Health on Monday joined a growing list of government agencies targeted in a digital spying operation by Russia whose damage remains unclear but is thought to be extensive, the Washington Post reported late Monday.
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans truly believed Russians were evil.
And our enemies.
Not comrades.
Memories…
Of course this would be after Cheetolini fired the head of cybersecurity…whether or not he is an active Russian agent, Trump is damn sure doing everything a Russian agent would do in his place.
There would have been a lot more systems compromised it organizations had kept up to date on software patches.
Sometimes it pays to wait…
Other articles call it a “manual supply chain attack” which either means a hacker posed as an engineer and got hired at one of these companies or used some type of social+actual engineering to pose as an employee to inject the malicious code. Clever. And also an act of war.
Trump will have to fire the person that discovered this security breach. Certainly that discovery was not part of the scheme.
Useful idiot. Probably even better than an actual agent, particularly in that position. An agent is smart enough to figure things out and try to game you back. An idiot… is just an idiot.
I wouldn’t assume for a second that Trump had any awareness of this hack or fired Krebs in advance of it. Trump is a Russian asset but not trustworthy enough to provide any details to.
Also you can read Mr. Krebs’ Twitter feed to get his running take on this.
Now we see the final result of Trump asking for help from Russian hackers. I hope all those who kept Hillary from the presidency are really pleased with themselves now.
I don’t see this as an attack on our government. It is bigger than that. This is industrial espionage on a massive scale. And I expect that a lot of companies, and other governments, are not going to be quite as forthcoming about whether they have been breached.
Don Bobo stuffed his incompetent patronage stooges into every department to direct them away from work that the previous admin advised them they needed to keep up with. Same as they did with the pandemic playbook, y’know - fox, henhouse…no surprises here.
Krebs, the one they fired did manage to safeguard election hacking or it could have been worse.
Was it a hack?
Or was it a Trump Inc give away?
The workings of the U.S. government are obviously of huge interest to the Russians and are now a lot more transparent to them than they are to U.S. citizens, almost half of which have proven themselves willfully delusional anyway. We will likely be the last to know and the least interested.
Meanwhile, someone in the senate is thinking of holding an emergency committee meeting to ascertain the extent of Hunter Biden / Burisma’s involvement in the hack - which definitely did not happen under Trump’s watch and which absolutely did not compromise numerous government agencies.
The only reason for not targeting everyone available would be lack of disk space or processing power. We’ll be finding more. What’s not clear to me is what level of write access this hack gave the russians, in addition to apparently universal read access. With even moderate write access, it’s possible to install persistent threats that are hard to detect and almost impossible to eradicate short of burning everything down and starting over. (The skeeviest ones of those I’ve read about recently are the ones that rewrite a computer’s BIOS, so that reformatting the disks does nothing. And if you do it right, since the BIOS is in charge of the code that updates the BIOS, the malware can intercept all attempts to get rid of it. And report that those attempts have succeeded.)
Have to appreciate Krebs immediate positioning-- and his public advisements to non-governmental entities.
Add this to a thick and growing catalog of blistering Republican incompetence. They are individually and collectively unfit for any position of trust. I don’t think the President-Elect could’ve possibly foreseen how deep is the hole Rump has dug us, and it gets deeper each day.
FBI Failure: 9-11
FBI Failure: 2016 election hack
FBI Failure: 2020 Russia hack
See a pattern here?
Over the last month or so, I’ve taken a variety of onboarding training for the two projects I’m on, including the one for the Navy (which has yet to give me a start date, but I digress).
Each of these projects has had me sit through this cyber-hacking training. I’m not even a programmer and have no access to any code, but EVERYone sits through this training, public or private sector.
And yet we have this, from the people who are supposed to be at the forefront of cyber-security.
Sheesh.
Article from a trade group e-zine Federal Computer Week: