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retox

>The Gmail messages of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, were famously hacked last year

No, he was phished.

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In fact, we can prove that.

Here is the phishing email in question: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/34899

The stats page for that bitly link shows two clicks on it from the time in question, proving they actually visited it: https://bitly.com/1PibSU0+

I'd consider it the same, just using a little more social engineering.

They are the same, but the article said "His Gmail messages were hacked" rather than "Podesta was hacked". The former implies (or could be interpreted as implying) that Gmail itself was breached, which is not true in this case.

Fair point. Thanks for clarifying, I see a difference now.

2fa would have protected him.

Is 2fa that big of a deal to a dedicated attacker who gets the victim to enter their info into a phishing page? (Just thinking of passcode-style 2fa, not usb key 2fa.) The attacker just has to forward the victim's login info to a login page, and then if the attacker gets a 2fa prompt, they prompt the victim with a 2fa prompt and then forward the victim's answer immediately.

I understand a lot of attackers don't bother since there's plenty of easier victims without 2fa, but if they're targeting a specific individual, it's not that much more work to make their attack work on 2fa too.

That's why U2F is a better alternative - it avoids the phishing issue as well as the password reuse issue.

I've had a number of successes in phishing tests against 2FA protected Office 365 services.

https://github.com/technion/3652fa

IIRC, he wasn't using 2FA at the time.

He was spear-phished by a state agents, which should be the actual outrageous part of this.

The proof that it was actually Russians seems paper-thin

If its good for the CIA, it's good for me.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/russia-responsible-pod...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama...

If its good for the CIA, it's good for me.

Really? Despite their motivations to distort reality and after all the incompetence they displayed over the decades, you still consider CIA a credible source? You're not even reading their internal reports, these are just some leaks and statements to the press.

Yes, really, because the alternative is abandoning all reason and believing a hostile pariah state.

Isn't that circular? Part of the reason you believe Russia is a hostile pariah state is because the CIA tells you it is.

As for "If don't believe US intelligence agencies I've abandoned all reason" ... just laughable, really

I saw the pictures of the bodies in Donetsk after MH17 and the propaganda war that followed, at this point it is self-evident.

What does Ukrainian separatists (who, yes, enjoy Russian backing) mistakenly shooting down a passenger plane have to do with Russians supposedly hacking the DNC? It's like saying the US must be making it up because look at the pictures of Abu Ghraib.

Eh...

You are not supposed to believe everything CIA says is true. The most basic application of 'Critical reading' and evaluation of their past statements disproves that.

If you want to 'believe in' CIA (as opposed to the 'hostile state'), what you should believe is that whatever CIA tells you to believe is beneficial to you and the States, regardless of if it is true.

Now of course you might be thinking, are you and the States really millions of Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan and Syrian lives more safe?

We just recently ended a war that was started because of that sort of thinking. It even involved that same government agency. You might even say we are still dealing with the horrific aftermath from that war, caused by that same sort of thinking, done by that same group of people...

The CIA's missions for the past 60 years have been overthrowing random governments and imposing dictatorships just for fun (with the results almost always backfiring massively on the US) and spreading ridiculous propaganda. Their lies and interference made the Middle East the mess it is today. If they're trustworthy, so is Charles Manson.

The same CIA who told us Iraq had WMDs, right? Sounds like a great idea to believe everything they say uncritically.

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