Syria Hacks The Onion

Once the attackers had access to one Onion employee’s account, they used that account to send the same email to more Onion staff at about 2:30 AM on Monday, May 6. Coming from a trusted address, many staff members clicked the link, but most refrained from entering their login credentials. Two staff members did enter their credentials, one of whom had access to all of our social media accounts.

After discovering that at least one account had been compromised, we sent a company-wide email to change email passwords immediately. The attacker used their access to a different, undiscovered compromised account to send a duplicate email which included a link to the phishing page disguised as a password-reset link. This dupe email was not sent to any member of the tech or IT teams, so it went undetected. This third and final phishing attack compromised at least 2 more accounts. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account.

At this point the editorial staff began publishing articles inspired by the attack. The second article, Syrian Electronic Army Has A Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Deaths At Hands Of Rebels, angered the attacker who then began posting editorial emails on their Twitter account. Once we discovered this, we decided that we could not know for sure which accounts had been compromised and forced a password reset on every staff member’s Google Apps account.

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Sunday Afternoon Matinee

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Rêves doux…

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Strongbox

NEW YORK (WNBTv) - In a move that undoubtedly had [snark] absolutely no relationship to the DoJ’s recent violation of journalists’ civil liberties [/snark], The New Yorker today unveiled Strongbox, a Tor-enabled dead drop as a means of providing you, the Citizenry, with a reliable, anonymous means to -

 …share information, messages, and files with our writers and editors and is designed to provide you with a greater degree of anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.

Senior Editor  made the announcement: “This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.” (link)

The New York Times, when apprised of Strongbox’s deployment by The New Yorker, responded: “Shit…wish we had thought of that.”

A source at the Kansas City Star, speaking anonymously since no one at the Star is allowed to say anything, ever, to anyone about internal Star operations, did say “Well..it’s nice and all, but we won’t use it. Fact of the matter is some local blogs do far more meaningful investigative journalism than the Star has for at least a decade – why would anyone send US stuff?”

The DoJ’s Eric Holder issued the following statement:

“I am not sure how many times the Justice Department will attempt to “hack” The New Yorker’ new ‘Strongbox’ system and snoop among the documents sent to them. All I can say at this point is that that number will be greater than one (1), though probably less than one million (1,000,000). Unless we automate the system, in which case there will be no upper limit to our egregiously unconstitutional endeavors. Thank you.”
 

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From Here To There

“When I am speaking to students, I like to show them a still from the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street in which the masterful financier Gordon Gekko is talking on his cell phone, a Motorola DynaTac 8000X. The students always — always — laugh: The ridiculous thing is more than a foot long and weighs a couple of pounds. But the revelatory fact that takes a while to sink in is this: You had to be a millionaire to have one. The phone cost the equivalent of nearly $10,000, it cost about $1,000 a month to operate, and you couldn’t text or play Angry Birds on it. When the first DynaTac showed up in a movie — it was Sixteen Candles, a few years before Wall Street — it was located in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, which is where such things were found 25 or 30 years ago. By comparison, an iPhone 5 is a wonder, a commonplace miracle. My question for the students is: How is it that the cell phones in your pockets get better and cheaper every year, but your schools get more expensive and less effective? (Or, if you live in one of the better school districts, get much more expensive and stagnate?) How is it that Gordon Gekko’s ultimate status symbol looks to our eyes as ridiculous as Molly Ringwald’s Reagan-era wardrobe and asymmetrical hairdos? That didn’t just happen.”

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