The Farce of the DNC Hack

Information Security
Information Security

Recently I wrote an article on Hillary’s email blunder, highlighting the folly of her defense of her miss-management of her email accounts, personal and business, exposing those accounts to potential hacks. I would like to talk about email folly again; this time involving the “hack” of the DNC (Democratic National Convention).

Yes, and once again the hack of the DNC was gained through a poorly secured email account. The comical part of the DNC hack was not the hack itself, for I’m not a fan of any illegal hack, but the quick-to-blame-the-Russians for the hack.

Why would the “Russians” hack the DNC? What would be the point? If you listened to Liberal media outlets like CNN & MSNBC they would like you to think it’s because the Russians want Trump to win the election.

That’s funny, because I’m sure the Russians would prefer for Hillary to win rather than Trump. With Trump winning the presidency Putin would be forced to deal with a person who says what he means and does what he says, whereas with Hillary they know exactly what they are getting; 4 more years of another weak president they can push around.

The Hillary supporters would have you believe Putin is scarred of Hillary, what with the toy ‘reset button’ she reset buttonpresented to Putin while Secretary of State. Sadly her and ‘reset button’ turned out to be a green light to Russia extending their influence in the Middle East and Central Ukraine.

Back to the point: the claim the Russians hacked the DNC was a farce, and they knew it. Here’s why.

Without venturing to far back in history, let’s just do a 60 second recap of hacking, sticking to computer hacking, not its predecessor phreaking. Going back to the 80’s, anyone remember the movie Wargames?

The story is about a teen while trying to access a video game company to play the games they are about to release, but winds up hacking into a U.S. nuclear missile defense system almost causing WWIII.

Wargames the movie, a hacker cult classic, had a thread of truth running through it, as it gives an insight into types of hackers.

Hackers can be divided into a few basic groups:

  1. Hackers wanting to access information that is private, playing online games for free and such, accessing personal info for no other reason than personal entertainment by embarrassing the hackee. This type of hack could be mischief, like hacking into company data bases just to prove they could.
  2. Then there are those having a more malicious intent, creating viruses, worms, and other forms of malware, that infects personal pc’s turning them into bots, spewing the virus to other machines via email contact lists, or infected links, turning unsuspecting pc’s into remote slaves, capturing key strokes and accessing built in cameras.
  3. Hackers who are in it for the money. Identity theft, ransomware (where your files are encrypted and you can get the unlock key if you pay the hacker for it), or hacks of banks involving large sums of money.
  4. Then there is espionage. Hacks involving governments spying on each other. This is the most serious type of hacking. This type of hacking has National security implications, even matters of life and death.

If we consider the groups we’ve just mentioned, which on do you think is the most likely? We can safely rule out group 4, for there are no National Security interests in the DNC database (of there shouldn’t be). So the Russian government wouldn’t risk exposure on this type of hack.

With every hack there are footprints, clues as to the perpetrator, all governments are aware of this, so, the reward must be worth the risk.

That leaves 3 possible groups. With the absence of any reports of monetary theft, group 3 could be eliminated. That leaves 2 groups; groups 1 and 2. Could the supposed DNC cause publicity problems? Yes. Could these problems become serious? Yes, especially with the presidential election looming.

As it turned out a hacker going by the name Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC email account and turned the documents over to Wikileaks

It also turns out the hacked documents from the DNC were extremely embarrassing. Embarrassing enough to causewikileaks-and-dnc Debbie Wasserman Schultz to change jobs from DNC chair to Hillary Campaign manager.

Accusing the Russian Government of the hack was a farce. While Liberals may have believed it, Putin is no doubt still laughing, as well as everyone in the I.T. community.