So I’m seeing drips and drabs with what seems to be increasingly leaking info that the US Gov was hacked…and the severity seems to be growing with each drip…
With so much else going on to keep up with, especially around the holidays, I’ve not had time to deep dive.
Thought it deserved a thread.
Just got a push notification that a nuclear arms agency was breached, but there seems to be little info on how bad it is or what it ultimately means.
Seems like a big deal, tho. Yeah?
It’s a huge deal, but it’s not like the government is going to talk about what was stolen, assuming information was stolen. The data that was available apparently covered a variety of strategic vulnerabilities AND it’s apparently been going on for months and we didn’t know about it. Our embarrassing national cybersecurity certainly leaves something to be desired.
It’s been going on since March, it’s the Russians (surprise!), and they’ve gotten into a staggering number of our national security agencies. Among many others, they’ve spent a lot of time digging around in the Dept. of Energy – which is tasked with safeguarding our nuclear stockpiles.
Quick overview of the situation:
There will be thousands of articles written about this as it unfolds. We’d better pace ourselves.
It’s being characterized as an act of war by some and also the most consequential breach of our national security in our history.
To my mind, it’s also the most predictable breach ever. What did we think was going to happen, given Trump’s obvious coziness with Putin; his installation of loyalists to all top spots in government; his complete disregard of his responsibilities to safeguard our national security or comply with norms such as having someone present in his conversations with Putin?
Remember October 2019? When Dimitrios Vastakis, branch chief of the White House computer network defense, resigned in frustration?
I remember hardly a peep about it at at the time.
Gina Haspell should be packing her bags, among many others.
And excuse my language, but why the FUCK do we have a DHS? Seems like all they do is repress Americans or put kids in cages or knuckle down on aspiring immigrants and downtrodden refugees. They sure don’t keep the so-called Homeland secure.
It’s bad. And I don’t know how anyone didn’t see it coming.
Isn’t that what this thread is for?
My bad for not scouring that 15 day old thread…that is in the deep opinion area. Oops.
I’ve observed lots of threads in lots of places for the same things. Personally, I could hardly stomach it being posted in MPSIMS, because this issue is neither mundane or pointless. I think we can handle two threads in two places. Just speaking for myself, of course.
Reading about the Russian hacking in the news has really gotten my blood boiling, so I went looking for a thread on this. I agree, even though the MPSIMS thread has more posts, that’s a bad category for a thread of this type. So I’m choosing this one in which to rant.
So, I just read this NYT article. Key quote:
President Trump has yet to say anything about the attack.
Is there any doubt that this level of hacking by the Russians would not have happened under any other administration but trump’s? First there is trump’s clear subjugation to Putin over the last 4 years, whatever the reason: Kompromat, being in debt to Putin, just plain admiration from one wanna-be dictator to a real dictator, or a combination thereof. And then there’s the massive incompetence of his government appointments, or the lack of appointments in key positions at all.
If trump had managed to win another 4 years, this country would be completely owned by Russia. This needs to be made clear. I think from now on, no matter how many acquaintances, former friends or family I piss off, any time I hear anyone within earshot say something favorable about trump, I’m going to speak up and say trump is a traitor who either actively or passively tried (and largely succeeded) to sell out this country to Putin. I know it won’t change any minds of any trump kool-aid drinkers, but it should be said.
Agreed, but moreover, with regard to the bold, it’s not just Trump who has Russia connections; people around Trump have Russia connections.
I would not be at all surprised to find out later that there are active Russian assets/agents working in the highest levels of the intelligence community. Nor would it surprise me if we later found out that such agents are known to others in the highest levels of this administration and that they are acting pretty much out in the open with impunity.
If anyone believes that the behavior of Trump’s administration is merely coincidental and that it’s just indicative of an egotistical guy who can’t accept losing, I’d suggest we rethink that and really think long and hard about the real reasons people don’t want to give up power, and why people who get elected democratically would refuse to agree to leave the way they came in.
Again, it’s not just Trump who’s afraid of going to jail – in fact I think his risk of federal prosecution and imprisonment is considerably lower than that of some of his associates. I think they are in some cases just as responsible for pushing post-election conspiracy theories and urging Trump to fight on as Trump is himself.
What jumped out at me from this morning’s article was describing it as something along the lines of “routine spying, of the sort the US does routinely.”
Not saying we should be happy about this recent success, but I’m not sure we should criticize others from doing the same thing we are.
The point isn’t that Russians are doing “routine spying, of the sort the US does routinely.” It’s that we’re doing nothing to defend against it. Even before his occupation of the Oval Office, Trump has actively encouraged it and left the back door wide open.
Hackers gonna hack. Our national security under Trump to defend against it has been an abysmal failure.
This former FBI deputy director says trump took money for the wall away from the cyber security program. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true. He shrank the pandemic monitoring budget after all.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI deputy director for counterintelligence, said that the reason such attacks are occurring is that the budget for cybersecurity under the Trump administration had been squeezed in order to prioritise other things.
IMO this should be investigated but that only happens when Dems are accused of something.
Why do I think this may have something to do with why the Pentagon has been instructed to stop briefing incoming Biden administration officials?
Obfuscate, obfuscate, obfuscate.
That link is pretty damning of the current administration. I guess all the Trumpsters out there think the hacking was a good thing since agent orange obviously brought it about.
Such as Moscow Mitch McConnell.
In January, he had raised red flags among Republicans and -Democrats alike when he took a key role in lifting sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Putin ally under FBI investigation for his involvement in 2016 election-meddling; three months later, Deripaska’s aluminum company, Rusal, announced a $200 million investment in Kentucky.
This is terrible but not terribly surprising.
In the world of cybersecurity defense is much more difficult than offense. If a offensive cyber campaign fails you blame the subgroup who you secretly hired (or just deny everything) then try again. There is no significant fall out or retribution because it’s difficult to prove the actor behind the attack. It may take years of trying but only one attack needs to be successful.
More money invested in cybersecurity may have stopped it or it may not have. Predicting the outcome in a cyber conflict is much less straightforward than in a physical conflict.
What’s your take on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller’s order for a “Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation” with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition? Any connection to this massive hack by the Russians? Is it normal for national security officials at the highest level to “take a knee for two weeks” in the middle of this huge intelligence breach?
This is quite shameful, especially considering that the internet was invented by the USA: they have stolen your toy and now they are using it against you.
The people in the USA who are still proficient with the internet must feel quite frustrated, as they have been warning about this for years. Now they see that what they warned about has been going on for months - undetected! And nobody in the current administration seems to give a damn. What would it take to start a revolution against this bunch of cronies? Spoiler: Imagine if they baddies had erased the cat content on YouTube! That would elicit a response like none has ever been seen before!
But as it stands, it seems from the other side of the Atlantic that this will only elicit some additional pardons.
Under Trump it is the USA themselves who have become the losers. Unbelievable.
Moscow Mitch is one, but there are probably others within the administration – again, some people have their fingerprints on anything illegal that has happened over the past four years.
Let’s take Trump’s name out of it and objectively look at some of the behaviors we’ve observed.
Why are there unprecedented reports of destroying records that, by law, must be maintained?
Why is Trump obsessed with staying in power? He’s a unique kind of narcissist? Okay, sure, but if this were just a case of a single candidate out on an island refusing to accept reality, nobody would care. We care because it is clear that despite losing, he clearly has a very strong grip on people who, at least according to tradition, won’t even have jobs a few weeks from today.
Now think about that – why are people so loyal? That’s just their character and Trump found some kindred souls to work with and for him? Okay, maybe. I think that’s true of any autocratic-like administration or regime. But think about those regimes: how often is it the case that it’s only the autocrat who is the one breaking the law? There’s skin in the game. There are people in the government who have broken laws - some of which carry stiff penalties - and they are determined to stay out of jail.
This is what autocratic or authoritarian regimes do. This is how they behave. From the top, the autocrat demands loyalty over public duty. The autocrat has to offer something in exchange for loyalty. He offers jobs - that’s one way. But that’s only temporary. The autocrat isn’t satisfied with having power temporarily. He must go beyond just offering a typical job. He has to offer something extra. Think about the PPP loans, to use an example. Think of how many of Trump’s crooked cronies got loans (probably with minimal or no oversight). Some of these deals for PPP were probably criminal. The deal is that nobody talks about it. Everyone hangs together or hangs separately.
The last four years have not been presidential administration; they have been an alternative to democratic administration. It’s been not the democratic experiment of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison; the founding fathers of this experiment are the likes of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro, Andrzej Duda, Alexander Lukashenko, Ron Desantis, Brian Kemp, Scott Walker.
That this kind of hack has happened isn’t scary; it was inevitable. I’m sure the United States has done this to other countries many times over. What’s horrifying is if I didn’t know any better, it would seem that the fire department itself is on fire and that the fire department is simply walking out of the station and watching itself burn.
It will be interesting to see where the pardons fly in the next few weeks. If there are pre-emptive pardons out of the blue for folks that have not even been charged with anything, this will probably indicate where the underlying deals were located.