Fake news in the New Year
Folks are repeating the story that fake news on Facebook brought down the Clinton campaign, well, that and some kind of hack by the Russians. So it’s about time that the Washington Post combined those concepts and wrote their own fake news story about Russians hacking. This one claims that they hacked the power grid in Vermont.
A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials.
While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a security matter, the discovery underscores the vulnerabilities of the nation’s electrical grid. And it raises fears in the U.S. government that Russian government hackers are actively trying to penetrate the grid to carry out potential attacks.
According to Burlington Electric Department clarifies that they found a stream of code that might be Russian, but it was in a laptop that wasn’t connected to the grid’s network;
From AOL News;
Burlington Electric discovered that the laptop had been infected after the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint report Thursday that included code believed to have been used by Russian hackers to penetrate the Democratic National Committee.
The utility scanned its own systems for evidence it had been infected with malware and discovered a single laptop had been compromised — again, one that was not connected to the electrical grid.
[…]
What’s crucial is that we don’t even know if the code was intended to disrupt the utility, or if hackers just wanted to test if they could penetrate the system. We also don’t know when the malware infected the laptop.
I hear the Russians also hacked Mariah Carey’s New Years Eve performance. Maybe the Washington Post should check that out, too.
Category: Media
We got a tree around here that goes by many names. Tamarac, Larch, tackmahack and my favorite Hackmatack. Gotta be a connection to the Russians there somewhere./s
The strategy is as opaque as Saran Wrap. Clintonistas and election deniers will ferret out any instance of hacking that might involve a Russian. In this way, the bogus hacking claim that want so desperately to be true but isn’t might have some legitimacy by association. It’s common guilt by nationality. I thought the Left was against that sort of thing.
Khuyesos.
More than likely someone at the Burlington Electric Department was browsing illicit websites on a city owned laptop and could not resist clicking “Russian Girl Looking For American With Job”.
I’ve read elsewhere that the laptop didn’t even belong to the utility, that it was employee owned.
Why they allow someone to bring in a laptop is a mystery.
You’d be amazed what goes on at smaller/municipal utilities.
Ever work in the NMCI* environment? I’ve had to bring my personal laptop into work on several occasions, and always when I’m on travel.
*Navy/Marine Corps Computer Intranet. AKA No More Computer Information
Apparently, under Lightbringer barry, NMCI stands for:
Never Mind the Constant Intruders
Hey, that guy monitoring the gauges at the power plant for 8 hours has to have something to entertain hisself during his shift. Pornwatching is prolly a common hobby at the plant. Click on enough of those sites and your lap-top computer is bound to catch something.
^^^^ All of these ^^^^
But the WaPo printed it. They can’t print anything if it isn’t true. I read that in the WaPo.
Bon jour.
French model eh?
Yep. Um. Er. Oui!
It’s gotta be true ’cause they gots all those layers and layers of fact checkers and editors and other sh*t and stuff like that.
And in other “news”, Jill Stein is demanding a recount of the Rousey/Nunes fight.
Recounting the number of times Nunes hit her is going to take a while.
Jill Stein is busy recounting all that extra “green” her party harvested with that fiasco.
I wonder how much of that loot has been either stashed away in the coffers of some “Foundation” or “Charity” or spent on “Administrative Fees” by now?
Probably most of it.
Oh, I am SO disappointed that they found my cat out! I told my pussy to stay off the computer, and this is what happens when they just do not listen to you. Now I have to call up Burlington Electric and tell them I’m sorry my pussy interfered with their grid.
Well allrighty then
Damn Kitty Porn…
You gotta watch ’em every second.
lol
They’re awful!!! And when they snore…!
My laptop was giving me fits locking up, so I went to a site and downloaded Malwarebytes freeware and ran it. It found and quarantined a couple hundred PUPs and PUMs*, and the laptop is now back to spec.
I blame the Russians, of course.
*Potentially Unwanted Programs/Modifications
I blame Bush.
I am SO glad I had finished my coffee before I read this!
what is funny about this whole faux news thing is that the same government that seems just so certain that the Russians did it publish a NIST 800 series of guides for IT security in which they point out that 90% of all problems stem from poor administrative policy.
Things like allowing software not needed for role to remain on systems, not setting everything to least privilege, and my personal favorite, granting sysadmin rights to everyone.
Most of the time, these “hacks” turn out to be a complete lack of due diligence and due care on the part of the IT Dept or IT contractor because no one gives a damn and the prizes are all made up anyway.
I’m betting a dollar to a glazed donut that the Burlington “hack” was an insider doing things they should not have had permissions to do because C-suite management could give a flying turkey flip.
That there never seems to be any consequences is by design….
It would help if companies were not hiring the IT equivalent of the 3 stooges….
Tp paraphrase Dr. Jones;
It would in better hands with the Marx Brothers.
As stated earlier, a lot of smaller/municipal utilities can’t even spell IT.
I’d have to look, but I’m not really sure what or even if any Burlington Electric assets fall under NERC/CIP or critical cyber assets. There are a few generating stations, but most are hydro, and virtually nothing above 34.5KV. I would imagine most of the critical assets in fact belong to VELCO.
Perhaps, but any IT dept with more than one laptop to manage should at least try professionalism now and then.
In general, the fedgov is no examplar of good governance, but the NIST is a referential base one cannot go wrong with.
The real problem is one of professionalism. IT in general still operates as if it is 1997 and anything goes.
As for whether they fall under NERC/CIP, any organization running any form of SCADA or infrastructure controls needs to be carefully following the guidelines, even if for only one HVAC unit. But again, this is a study in a general lack of professional discipline.
While *nix is pretty secure, I have to wonder how many sites are vulnerable because the sysadmin left default passwords unchanged.
Most “hackers” are teens who downloaded a package (or packages) of tools which aids software breaking & entering. They’re known as “script kiddies” for a reason.
The left is going to win this. They will rewrite history to suit themselves and most, including most of us, will remember only what the left chooses to hammer into us over and over and over again.
Just like they did with Bill Clinton in recasting him as a ‘centrist’ POTUS. Clinton was actually farther left that Obama but was neutralized by a GOP legislature that hadn’t fully surrendered to the DNC like the one we have now.
When you own both the academy and the means of propaganda you have a large degree of control over what is accepted as “true”. Until the right can figure out an effective counter to this, we will be behind in the game.
Jonn is correct about the hack of Mariah Carey’s New Year”s Eve performance-the hacker got into the wardrobe subsystem and deleted her pants (Mariah-you are not Tina Turner and you are 47 years old, put on pants).
“put on pants”
Good god please. Her tits look like a giant deflated May West and the booze is all over her face. It’s over sweetie.
Tina Turner has class and talent, Mariah Carey DOES NOT.
So, Podesta try’s to claim a million dollar inheritance, there by infecting the DNC server with the Russian Voodoo clap, then someone thinks it would be a good idea to set the DNC server up with the BE laptop for some illegitimate infected electronic affection?
You want fake news I’m in.
Another sign of the pending apocolypse…
TAH and The Intercept agree on something https://theintercept.com/2016/12/31/russia-hysteria-infects-washpost-again-false-story-about-hacking-u-s-electric-grid/
Cats and dogs living together and all that.
*apocalypse
The zombie apocalypse will arrive first.
Even a broken clock or watch shows the correct time twice a day; so what, proglodyte? I wouldn’t believe anything that leftard cocksucker Gleewald wrote unless there was irrefutable independent verification.
He tends to use facts, evidence, and reason more than the rest of the “News” media these days.
But to each their own.
I have no doubt most on this board spend almost no time looking at anything that is not a right wing source.
We are fucked as a society at this point. Not only are we unable to agree on the solution we can’t even agree on the facts.
Pretty sure we all agree on you, Lars.
Zika-Panic Poodle, YOU actually believe left wing mess media proglodytes like that? NO wonder you didn’t make it in intel AND IMHO all that UC Berserkely Kool-Aid has given you irreversible brain damage. Seriously, I suggest that you let your hair grow, wear sunglasses, walk without drooling and slobbering and NO ONE will ever know that you were the recipient of a botched lobotomy except when you screech and shit your britches in front of God and everyone!
And you probably spent the last decade thinking Jon Stewart was a serious journalist and the dreck he blathered about was “real” news.
“We are fucked as a society at this point.” That’s true. Abortion, gay rights, trannies in the military, same-sex marriage, moral decay of the first order, an old commie supported in his nomination bid by millions of Free Cheesers, a lawless president supported by unscrupulous members of Congress, and a porous southern border that allows the dregs of a 3rd world country to come and go as they please. These things and more have screwed our society. So you see, Commissar, we can agree!
Really, Piuperdink? When did Reuters News become a right-wing news source?
That assertion with no basis in fact is your trademark, you know. Way to start the new year, being a sore loser and letting us know about it right away.
There are multiple dynamics at work with this stuff if you follow the money. The news media currently has a big credibility problem brought about by its failure to predict the outcome of the last election. Such a failure puts at risk both careers, and billions of dollars in advertising revenue.
Although the news media sees its failure as due to external factors such as fake news or Russian hacking, the actual reasons probably have more to do with the echo chamber effect of what the mainstream part of the business has become. An additional factor is that in order to not appear racist, the news media introduced bias in how it covered the campaign. To this day, the news media is generally unable to decouple Barack Obama the politician with an agenda, and Barack Obama the black man.
Meanwhile, there is also a lot of hand wringing going on in the news media on the business side about how fake news actually presents a lucrative business model. There’s been anecdotal evidence that a single blogger sitting around making stuff up can generate $30,000 per month in automated ad revenue without having to go through any of the effort of research, talking to sources, or checking facts.
And if the blogger’s “viral” story proves to be untrue, the damage has already been done and nobody is going to walk back what has been collected from page views.
We tend to think of American news media as a robust thing which has been able to withstand more than 200 years of democracy, but it’s actually not. It has always been subject to politics and market forces; the mystery is that it has survived at all.
$30,000 a month? Where do I sign up? I could use that!
Oh, wait – the blogger doesn’t get the revenue, right? Rats!
The real source of the “mainstream media’s” lack of credibility is not a lack of predictive capability at all. It is, to be blunt, the fact that they lie. All of the time, on everything. And no, that is not anyone’s fault but their own.
Let us face facts here. The highest prize a journalist can attain–the Pulitzer–is based on the work and money of a well known yellow journalist.
Nothing has really changed since Pulitzer plunged us into a war with Spain.
The “media” exists to make money. They manufacture their product for their markets, not based on objectivity or fact.
Our news media is not some esteemed “fourth estate” serving the “public interest”.
It is a business serving their own ends. I don’t have a problem with that, but it seems that the words that apply are:
Caveat Emptor.
Hmm, when a Republican claimed the Russians were messing with us, they called it McCarthyism. But when Hillary Clinton says it…
Nailed it!!!
*PING!* you hit the duck, here’s your cigar!
The 80s are on line 1…
For some reason, the Donkeys like to refer to (republican) Senator Joe McCarthy as the source of all anti-Red witch-hunting.
How convenient.
The bulk of the anti-Red activity was not in the Senate. It came front he House UnAmerican Activiites Comittiee. (HUAC)
House. I.E. the Donkey-Party controlled House of Representatives.
With very few exeptions, McCarthy was vindicated by subsequent exposure of Soviet actions, via VERONA decryptions and access to intelligence from the immediate post-soviet period.
The -House- on the other hand, had a much poorer track record. But the party of the Jackass would have us believe that it was all a republican fiasco, and their hands are of course clean and unstained.
Anyone remember the Lefty joy over the “Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmnament” (but just American arms, don’t get any weird ideas Comrade). No attempt to influence us there, right? Nor when Ted Kennedy went to the Reds for help defeating Reagan.
So the current “Russians! Russians! Medddling in our affairs! seems hypocritical in the extreme.
Basically, they are down to “Heads Dems win. Tails, CHEATER! CHEATER! They cheated!”
Now, now! You know quite well that the lamestream media is made up of an entire generation of children who never grew up, never will, and always blame someone else for their own failures.
Let’s not be too hard on people who can’t compete because they never liked having to compete. It’s… well, it’s just not FAIR! …or something.
TAH, the Intercept and *gasp* The Rolling Stone!!!!
http://downtrend.com/donn-marten/rolling-stone-writer-suggests-something-about-obamas-russian-hacking-story-stinks
Sometimes, the truth. Just. Hurts. Doesn’t it? (gigglesnort!)
In late 2016 B. Hussein 0bama bawled about “Fake News” in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Remember their fake rape story?
http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2016/11/30/barack-obama-discusses-fake-news-rolling-stone/
Wasn’t Bernie Sanders the mayor of Burlington?
His first “job”.
A coat factory with a mayor??
Nah, they actually do something useful. I’ve yet to see much productive going on in the PRofB, aside from IBM.
Yeah, he rolled into VT and lived in an abandoned sugar house for a little bit before convincing the tards in burlington to elect him Mayor and began his life of never having had a real job. Must have paid ok because he just plunked down $600k for a house up in Grand Isle. He must have used some of the payoff from The Clinton Foundation to do it
Washington Compost Pile
– Mark Dice
Speaking of fake news, let’s not forget the Clinton News Network’s BOGUS STORY ob the Anglo-American School in Moscow being shut down.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/12/30/wrong-again-russias-anglo-american-school-not-closing-to-spite-obama/#13d5ec807637
And let’s not forget the fake news of oBaMa attending a memorial for five slain Dallas police officers and using the solemn occasion to invoke slavery and Jim Crow laws. Check that. Turns out that one was real.
That news wasn’t fake, just the guy it was about, King Putt aka Commander 0.
WAPO removed the story…Guess they couldn’t stand the heat. Heh.
Guess a link would help….
http://nypost.com/2017/01/01/washington-post-retracts-story-about-russian-hack-at-vermont-utility/
And the Washington [com]Post is part of the moonbat proglodyte mess media that bawled about fake news alongside CNN, OH, sweet, sweet schadenfreude, *WHOOOOOT!*. ?????
Ever wonder what crow tastes like? Yeah, me neither! Never tried humble pie, either, or any of those other odd recipes for things you eat when you’ve made a public ass of yourself.
Right now, I’m trying to guess how much BS we’ll see in the first six weeks to 12 months of the Trump Admin, especially when they have to retract it and/or admit they just concocted it out of whole cloth.
The sad part is that this fake news crowds real news off the page.
In this case, the power grid really is vulnerable to damage; both hardware and software. It’s just not sexy enough to make page 1…
hell, where I live in Houston a heavy dew can knock our power out…and does. our little section of the grid seems to date to Tesla.(Nikola, not Elon Musk)
When I lived in Burlington (Green Mountain Battalion, ’88-’92), all it took to shut down the power grid was one squirrel in a transformer.
The joke about the city was “Q: What’s the best thing about Burlington? A: It’s so close to Vermont.”
Today’s generation would not have made it one day during the Cold War….
NOT EVEN in high school or college! I grew up in the Midwest during the seventies and eighties when anyone even thinking about bawling for something like a “safe space” got their asses kicked all the way to the moon, ditto in college!
Here is some fake news:
The “False Commander “Phony” Phil Monkress (CEO of All-Points Logistics) and his fat ass brother from another mother “Turd” Bolling of Ambassador Worldwide Protection Agency (both national and international) are good and solid dudes…..
Time to puke….
Both are a pair of “two-hole seekrit warriors”
[…] Events The Jawa Report: Death To 2016! The Political Hat: Happy New Year! This Ain’t Hell: Fake News In The New Year, also, Two VA Secretary Picks Bail On Trump Weasel Zippers: Congressional Black Caucus Plotting […]
This is too good. That darling of the Left, Saint Julian Assange, is quoted from an interview that is to air tonight that the Russians were not the source of the DNC emails he released. Instead, he says, the Russian story is a concoction being used to delegitimize Trump’s victory. I’d like to know what the Left will do with its sainted hero now–as if I didn’t know.