back to article Pwned Clinton aide Trumped

The Twitter account of Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta was hacked on Wednesday to back her rival US presidential candidate Donald Trump. Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta improbably declared for Trump following what’s since been confirmed as an account hijack. “I’ve switched teams. Vote Trump 2016. Hi pol,” a since …

  1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Windows

    It was Russia!

    It's certain. It was them!!

    I read it in the War Street Journal.

    Meanwhile sounds like there are Rumors of Aggressive War (a new kind of October Surprise?) in the vent system.

  2. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Podesta obviously didn't learn anything from Hillary's use of personal email services for work use.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Just the opposite - he did

      He did learn that he can get away with it.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Surprise

    The surprise isn't in a politician and friend of Hillary being shyte at personal online security.

    It's Trump troglodyte having the intelligence to take advantage of it!

  4. Frank Marsh
    FAIL

    Zero Progress

    My family never seems to think they would be worth hacking, so can't be bothered to care about basic security.

    But you would think that a campaign being actively targeted and actually breached would lead at least the top people in the campaign to take some security measures. Even basic stuff like using different passwords for different accounts. How hard is that?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Zero Progress

      "How hard is that?"

      From the lack of progress, one can only assume that it's impossible.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Zero Progress

      "I'm a top brass, so policies and rules don't apply to me because I'm obviously smarter than anybody else, and I value my personal comfort over everything else, so I don't want to be bothered with them, and I'll do as I like". That's what they thing.

      Anyway, even your family accounts could be worth hacking. Once, one of mine was (probably through a configuration mistake on a smartphone which didn't used SSL for SMTP access, and a compromised hotel wi-fi), and the used to send spam. Even if the read the mail they weren't much valuable, but a non blacklisted mail server was.

      1. Phil W

        Re: Zero Progress

        "I'm a top brass, so policies and rules don't apply to me because I'm obviously smarter than anybody else"

        Given that his role is as an aide to a presidential candidate (who is to a large extent just a private individual), rather than an actual government official, I'm not sure there are any rules or policies beyond internal party ones and certainly no laws that were being broken. I think, much as I believe was the case with Hilary's email fiasco, stupidity rather than arrogance or criminality is the order of the day here.

  5. Gravis Ultrasound

    OPMs to come

    We can expect a continuity on cybersecurity between the Obama and Clinton administrations...

    There's a future for Podesta heading Office of Personnel Management.

  6. Stevie

    Bah!

    Given that most of the utility of a mobile device is apparently unavailable on a sanctioned government supplied device (which is why so many pols are contravening the rules and bringing their own phones to work), 2FA would have only introduced yet another (political) attack vector into the sums along the lines of:

    Oooh! Oooh! Podesta is using an illegal phone to do government business! Killary obviously made him do it to cover up some evidence about that Benghazi Whitewater stuff on how Muslim Obama isn't an American citizen.

    There is ample evidence from months of "debate" that our politicians aren't smarter than the average person. They just want to use technology, not worry about how it works, like 99% of everyone in the world. That's Steve Jobs' great epiphany from Whenback Way: People want computers to work like toasters do.

    Never actually got there, of course, but not for want of trying. the iPad was a worthy attempt but proved that in order to get a computer that works like a toaster does one must compromise over what one uses the computer for.

    Of course, now we have the Internet of Tat we can look forward to toasters that work the way computers do: at their own speed, subject to random time-wasting updates that change their behavior, and not at all after some twat pwns them.

  7. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Critical thought

    The /pol reference suggests that denizen of 4chan - rather than state-sponsored Russian hacker

    I bet Russia (nor anyone else) realised it was quite so simple to have blame so easily directed.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh come on people!

    We all know it wasn't hacked, the guy actually changed camps until Clinton's "men in black" forced him to rejoin and then go on to claim his twitter account was hijacked

  9. Grunchy Silver badge

    Is there an actual Clinton camp, btw? Like as in, cookouts & afternoon hikes & sleeping in tents and all that jazzwinder?

    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      They could start one for the young wannabes.

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