Amazon still flirting with Australia, Does the Valley need more tourist locations, and why we’re not covering that hacking story…
Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.
Follow us on Soundcloud.
A special thanks to all our supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.
If you are willing to support the show or give as little as 5 cents a day on Patreon. Thank you!
Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!
Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!
Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke, sebgonz and scottierowland on the subreddit
Show Notes
To read the show notes in a separate page click https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oY2XMRtMlaBEujRfmD2cy7x1F-amg-OXQSqhL3qUqmQ/pubhtml?gid=1622802649&single=true!
Hey Guys,
Regarding the story you aren’t covering… the tech angle on the election/Russia hacks surfaced on Techmeme on October 22… but it hasn’t surfaced again since. I am not sure why. The details are interesting and relevant to the DTNS listenership…. in so far as how trivial the attacks appear to have been.
The basics are…
(1) This was a spearfishing campaign. The accounts were breached by someone clicking on a link in an email they shouldn’t have.
(2) The links were created using bitly. Two of the rogue accounts at Bitly were public… that’s why non-state security researchers were able to investigate the case.
(3) The links associated with the rogue accounts included thousands of other links targeted at government and military officials around the world. Analysis of that target list is why researchers believe the effort was state sponsored… not simply Russian-Anon. Who else — goes the argument — but a state-sponsored group would know the personal email addresses of people in the “German parliament, the Italian military, the Saudi foreign ministry” and the US government?
For more details see the reporting of Thomas Rid at Esquire.com and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Motherboard. Both reported on this on October 20th. The techmeme headlines from this past weekend appear to be re-assertions of what Esquire and Vice already reported… but with less detail.
And of course — since both stories are anonymously-sourced — some skepticism is still warranted.
One last detail… it appears from the leaked emails that many of the staffers on the Clinton campaign had Podesta’s password. He was using his gmail as a kind of group inbox. The lack of a sole-ownership is probably why that account… and not more personal ones… ended up being breached.
Anyway… in this story are several security-hygiene lessons for all.
Thanks Mark. Tom, I’d hate to see the podcast get too political, but this is turning into a rather large tech story. Maybe worth covering on Fridays with Darren anyway, since he specializes in the security and hacking angle on things?