Snowden Used Social Engineering To Get Classified Documents 276
cold fjord sends this news from Reuters:
"Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues ... to access some of the classified material he leaked. ... A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments. ... Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator. ... People familiar with efforts to assess the damage to U.S. intelligence caused by Snowden's leaks have said assessments are proceeding slowly because Snowden succeeded in obscuring some electronic traces of how he accessed NSA records. ... The revelation that Snowden got access to some of the material he leaked by using colleagues' passwords surfaced as the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill intended in part to tighten security over U.S. intelligence data. One provision of the bill would earmark a classified sum of money ... to help fund efforts by intelligence agencies to install new software designed to spot and track attempts to access or download secret materials without proper authorization.'"
Re:Fire them (Score:5, Funny)
Not Terry Childs!
Re:Snowden is a hero! (Score:5, Funny)
I agree comrade! Snowden deserves to be recognized as a Hero of the Soviet Union [wikipedia.org], but since those are no longer available a Hero of Russia [wikipedia.org] will have to do. Perhaps the FSB [wikipedia.org] nee KGB will someday announce his promotion! Glory to the workers of the Cheka for this achievement! We stand in solidarity with those that would smash capitalism and the bourgeois internet! Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat!
Who would have suspected? (Score:5, Funny)
Why shouldn't they trust him? He was polygraphed.
FTA:
"In the classified world, there is a sharp distinction between insiders and outsiders. If you've been cleared and especially if you've been polygraphed, you're an insider and you are presumed to be trustworthy," said Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/08/net-us-usa-security-snowden-idUSBRE9A703020131108 [reuters.com]
Re:Not shocked (Score:2, Funny)
This is the NSA we're talking about - the elite security professionals. They know better than to stick a post-it with their password onto their monitor.
They stick the post-it under their keyboard.
Re:Fire them (Score:3, Funny)
> ... he stole some passwords ...
and he didn't even do that, he merely copied them. This intellectual property debate is going out of hand!