Saturday, November 08, 2008
Campaign cyberattack: Intelligence gathering, or fodder for blackmail?
Newshounds read reports earlier in the week that security experts detected "attacks" on the networks of both presidential campaigns last summer, apparently from Russia or China (the report on NPR this morning called out only China, which may mean that we have narrowed the source). The supposed motive:
"FBI and White House officials told the Obama campaign that they believed that a foreign entity or organisation sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps' policy issues – information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration," Newsweek said.
Seriously? We think that the foreign spies were trying to figure out what Barack Obama and John McCain would do in a "negotiation" based on information inside his campaign's network? Does anybody actually believe that explanation? I would have thought that the campaign networks, what with all those candid emails and undisclosed documents, would be a much better source of embarrassing information that could be used to blackmail the new president than intelligence on the "evolution" policy positions. Am I the only person who is worried about that?
In unrelated news, China's president Hu Jintao and Barack Obama had their first telephone conversation today.
4 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Nov 08, 05:55:00 PM:
Silly, the Chinese weren't hacking into Obama's site for intellegence, they were merely contributing millions of dollars to his campaign. The cash-in-shopping-bags system they used with Gore didn't work well.
The Chinese want to be on the good side of a dem presidentl they buy some of our best military technology from them (see: Clinton).
By 
Ray, at
Sat Nov 08, 09:44:00 PM:
I'm going to suggest a much nastier possibility than mere blackmail. People reuse passwords, usernames, etc. If you can get into a relatively soft target, you can use that to leapfrog into a bigger one. Such as, say, the White House internal email network.
Does it sound fiendishly patient? Only to people used to thinking in terms of news cycles.
By , at
Sun Nov 09, 01:11:00 AM:
If only they had stolen and leaked the donor list ...
By Dawnfire82, at
Mon Nov 10, 10:37:00 AM:
Truly secret networks are not physically connected to the Internet, and cannot be hacked no matter what password you have unless you physically penetrate a site.
