• just_another_person@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I fully believe this is a cover story for RIGHTFULLY releasing the investigation details to the public, but I fucking LOVE that we can just blame anything on hackers now because certain people allow their shit to get to stolen all the time.

    Skip the middle men and just start leaving shit in insecure places you want the press to get, I say.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      Skip the middle men and just start leaving shit in insecure places you want the press to get, I say.

      Story time about how much our media sucks:

      2007, I was working for a small local television station in Washington state. Governors election between Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi. Through rummaging around on reddit, I found a lawyer with evidence that Rossi had illegally been accepting large donations from the Master Builders Association.

      This was direct from the lawyer and court documents. I printed up copies and put them on every newsies desk, since I was just News Production, and not a “journalist” myself.

      I’ll never forget our Producer talking to me about it, and how she “hadn’t seen anything about it on the AP newswire” so she wasn’t sure about it being true. I pointed out these were court documents and asked “have you ever heard of ‘breaking a story?’”

      We would not run the story until two weeks later, when the story had finally been picked up by the AP newswire… then we finally ran the story. Doing your own research as a journalist? That’s outside the job description apparently.

      This is up there with when NASA was going to be testing Lunar Rovers two hours away and our journalists were like “isn’t that outside of our coverage area?” Still photos of the lunar rover testing were the top story on wired.com internationally for a month afterwards. I guess the whole world was outside of our coverage area.

      Anyway, this is the kind of thinking you’re working against. Don’t break a story, don’t go outside your “coverage area.” These stories from me are almost 20 years old but I don’t expect for the television industry to have gotten smarter since then.

      So leaving the documents for them to find can easily result in those documents just getting memory-holed unless they show up on the AP newswire.

      • ieatpwns@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        That’s crazy she held the whole news station back from being reliable sources just because ap wasn’t running a story. How the hell did they think news breaks sheesh

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Skip the middle men and just start leaving shit in insecure places you want the press to get, I say.

      Should we call these Honeypot leaks? Create a server running on completely unpatched Windows XP then put what you want leaked, then attach it raw dog to the internet without any kind of firewall.

        • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Well then you’re still respotfor pointing people to it somehow.

          There’s no need to point it out. Hundreds of hacker scanners are running all the time across the internet looking for unpatched Operating Systems with known exploits. These are automatic by the hackers because the flaws are well documented.

          Imagine being told that there is one person in the world that will give you a million dollars cash and the only thing you need to do is ask them to give you the money. Now, imagine you have the phone numbers for every single person. It is trivially easy to set up a computer script that will go through the entire list and send each phone number a txt message asking them to give you the money. You’d start up this process and never have to revisit it except to check ever few weeks if someone responded that they’ll give you the money.

          This is how the hacker exploit scripts work. So for my example above, if I wanted my Windows XP computer hacked, I just need to leave it unpatched and plug it into the internet without any firewall. The hacking literally takes only 10 minutes for your Windows XP computer to be hacked.

          • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            Totally not how that works.

            Like you think “hackers” are just scanning the entire Internet like in Matrix world and stumbling on stuff?

            Lelz

            • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Totally not how that works.

              Its not the ONLY way how it works, but it absolutely can work that way.

              Like you think “hackers” are just scanning the entire Internet like in Matrix world and stumbling on stuff?

              You don’t have to take my word for it. You can, like, read the article I posted where they detail another IT professional went through the steps and recorded actual results. Is clicking on the link and reading too difficult because you’re too busy with “Lelz”?

              • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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                3 days ago

                By your logic:

                1. The Gaetz situation is in the news.
                2. “hackers” start scanning the entire Internet
                3. ???
                4. “hackers” find an unsecured machine as you suggest that just happens to have the documents they want
                • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  By your logic:

                  No, not by a long shot.

                  I am responding directly to your statement from your OP:

                  Skip the middle men and just start leaving shit in insecure places you want the press to get, I say.

                  I’m saying the person with the data they want leaked can create the insecure place where they know it will get picked up but still maintain plausible deniability. I’m agreeing with you.