World Anti-Doping Agency Says It Was Hacked By Russia (theverge.com) 97
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is accusing Russian state-sponsored hackers of hacking its database of athletes involved in this year's Olympic Games in Rio. Whether it's in response to the WADA banning 119 Russian athletes from participating in the games due to a doping scandal, it has yet to be determined. The Verge reports: The agency claims the state-sponsored group Fancy Bear is behind the attack, although it doesn't clarify how that attribution was made. The accessed data included medical information, like Therapeutic Use Exemptions issued by International Sports Federations and National Anti-Doping Organizations. The group has reportedly released some of this data and threatened to release more. The attackers reportedly relied on spear phishing emails to gain access to the database and eventually used credentials specifically made for the Rio Olympic games. Fancy Bear was the same group responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee earlier this year.
Re: America needs war! (Score:5, Interesting)
And not surprisingly, the US was discovered to be doping at massive levels thanks to the hack. US gymnastics gold medalist "super-star" Simone? Caught doping, but got "doctor's permission" to dope.
So it's not surprising that after a US-led investigation "caught" Russia doping, it turns out that the US was doping just as much. The only difference is that the US rewrote the rules to allow their doping.
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Anyone complaining about the treatment of American males must not have anything better to complain about.
In Russia the only fear is criticizing the government.
You shouldn't fear that. The government should fear the citizens, not the other way around. "When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
In the West, fear is the norm as everything is offensive to everyone.
1. How would you know? 2. How come I'm not afraid all the time?
You can't even look into a woman anymore without being charged for eye rape.
God, I hope not. That does sound awfully invasive, depending on which hole you're looking into.
Two can play this stupid game.
That's true, but some people are better at pla
Re: America needs war! (Score:4, Informative)
"Massive scale?" The hack listed a grand total of four athletes, all of whom had medical exemptions.
Biles' was for Ritalin for ADHD, a condition she has been under treatment for since she was a young child. Williams' was for painkillers and anyiinflammmatories for chronic injuries.
The fact that the media have failed to put the ridiculousness of the Russian claims front and center and have perpetuated the "drug cheats" narratice promulgated by the Russian hackers in their headlines shows just how far the standards of the fourth estate have fallen.
In fact, the hack doesn't show doping occurred at all, since the only evidence it has uncovered is for appropriate therapeutic uses of controlled substances under prescription and properly reviewed and obtained waivers by the WADA.
Of course for the 90% of news "readers" who merely look at a headline and pass judgment, none of this matters, and the damage is done. Yet because news outlets know that such salacious headlines are the only way to get views and resultant ad revenue, they are perversely incentivized to keep making them.
The Russkies aren't dumb; they know this effect well and are exploiting it to push their agenda in international discourse. The major political parties and their operatives in the U.S. do too, which is why you will see patently absurd headlines like "Trump Says Obama literally is the founder of ISIS" made, since the average reader is too stupid/lazy to look below the fold to see the body of the story explaining "duh, this isn't true" and will accept the statement at face value.
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How to Argue About Doping in Sport (Score:2)
I found this interesting article how to argue about doping in sport [theconversation.com]. I am not a sports fan in general, it's just never interested me. Thus, I am sitting on the sidelines rather than involved as so many are. From the sidelines the anti-doping movement has the flavor of a witch-hunt. Now, you might have good arguments in favor of it, but it should not go as unchallenged as it seems to be today.
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I mean, at the end of the day, any contest will have rules. If the question is doping, the only question should be, "what should the rules be on this". Questions regarding the harshness of the punishment, economic inequality, certain nations getting butthurt because they thought they had a foolproof way to cheat and did not... all are secondary. If you have a set of rules, those that violate them can't really be said to be participating at all.
Good link, and it seems mostly to be aimed at that.
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Well, auto racing used to be in part about building better cars. Until the turbine came along. Now, turbines and 4-wheel drive are banned at the Indy 500.
It's not too long before someone with a genetic advantage comes along and gets banned.
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Well, auto racing used to be in part about building better cars. Until the turbine came along. Now, turbines and 4-wheel drive are banned at the Indy 500.
That's utter nonsense. You might as well bitch that IndyCars aren't allowed in NASCAR races. Or that sticks with more than 1.5" curve depth aren't allowed in the NHL. Or that metal bats aren't allowed in MLB. Or double-strung rackets in tennis.
Every sport has rules and limits, often for safety if nothing else. If you don't think race teams have teams of engineers trying to make the car a teensy bit faster and a teensy bit better at holding speed in corners while staying within the design rules, time t
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2. On a purely humanitarian level, artificial rules are just itching to be contravened, and i'd rather people shoot up the stuff we understand rather than new test-evading substances with unknown effects.
The contest is supposed to be physical and mental, not chemical (or financial, if it comes to buying drugs from another country).
Regardless, you think a free-for-all won't result in athletes using less-than-tested drugs? Have any of these drugs gone through the rigorous test procedures that are say required for a prescription drug to come to market? Of course not.
Re:How to Argue About Doping in Sport (Score:5, Insightful)
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When rules are made that the methods you mention aren't allowed, then you can get on the USs case if they continue. Until then, how is it any difference than the athletes having access to a good gym vs what might be available to a third world country's athletes?
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I think you've nailed the point. All sports are necessarily an arbitrary set of rules. Without enforcement of those rules it's pointless.
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Sports are there to keep the general public dopey and not politically active, but ironically the players themselves can't use dope.
Whether or not either of those is true, your conclusion is ridiculous. I think you can do better than that.
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Yep, sounds like you got a few wedgies from the jocks when you were younger. Well, so did I. However, my son plays soccer and it makes a big difference in his life. Professional sports is one thing, but the vast majority of athletes struggle in silence without TV coverage or fans, with almost no wanking at all. Almost all Olympic athletes fall into that category.
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If they want to be modern day gladiators and kill themselves, then that's their right to be dumb as fuck for people's enjoyment.
It's our right as a society to impose rules on them because it's US sponsoring the competition. Which we are doing. You are right, they can take whatever drugs they want on their own time and compete in whatever competitions will allow them. Just not internationally regulated sports.
There are always rules in a competition. They don't allow mopeds in the 400 meter. You can't wear a jetpack in the pole vault. You can't cork your bat.
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Apparently it is not cheating if you get a medical exemption and you have a corrupt government backing that exemption. So if you suffer from "inability to attain sufficient muscle mass syndrome" or "inability to zone out and exercise like a bot syndrome" or "low threshold of pain syndrome" or "slow reflex syndrome", don't worry those countries who generate the most advertising dollars and those corrupt politicians who can pick up the most votes, with look at the sports winners and ignore the economy, will
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Just let them, and let them use well understood substances.
And what if they don't? After all, an athlete would NEVER use an untested performance enhancer to get an edge over those using the "understood substances", right?
Oh wait. THEY ARE ALREADY DOING THAT NOW.
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From the sidelines the anti-doping movement has the flavor of a witch-hunt. Now, you might have good arguments in favor of it, but it should not go as unchallenged as it seems to be today.
Well, you can argue for or against doping in general, but as it stands in the current rules, it's cheating. Sport has to have rules, otherwise it's not sport. With literally no rules, you could "win" the 100m sprint by using a rocket sled, or hell, by starting 1m from the finish line. As it currently stands it's about on t
Database Shouldn't Be Online (Score:1)
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The ADAMS database is where athletes have to log in and report their whereabouts in order to be available for out-of-competition testing (the most reliable way of catching dopers). It is also where athletes and the doctors requested Theraputic Use Exemptions (TUE's). There HAS to be a connection to make that work. Like too many of these types of hacks, it was a a weak user password that was compromised.
So far the dump just shows that the American athletes were following the rules like they were supposed to
the latest excuse for poor security (Score:5, Insightful)
"We were hacked by Russia" seems to be the latest excuse for poor security.
Hopefully, the World Anti-Doping Agency will be sued into oblivion over their mishandling of personal data.
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"We were hacked by Russia" seems to be the latest excuse for poor security.
Correct. Blame a security breach on an entity who people believe has advance hacking weapons, and you can claim no matter what steps you took, they would have got in. They think it will get them off the hook for their poor practices.
Trouble is, I can see why Russia WOULD do this, either to tamper with data on Russian athletes to remove harmful info, or to tamper with other athletes' info then have Russia point at the hack "by someone" and say the previous bad doping results for Russian athletes were a setup
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Always using the same easy to find Fancy Bear after an event, any event, all events.
Yet Fancy Bear is always able to get in with no issues, stay in totally undetected to get so much data out and exit gracefully without detection every time.
But is sti
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Wow. You even type Russian.
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No wonder fully intact logs, huge readable code fragments, a nations ip range and working day time zone data magically allowed to be fully discovered and recovered must be always point to a nation of origin..
Stay up late or early, the magical tool set that seems to be floating around for anyone to use and find a staging server with the perfect cover ip range...
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More Fancy Bear fiction again? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Julian Assange: 'A lot more material' coming on US elections" (July 27, 2016)
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07... [cnn.com]
""Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are,""
Its amazing how that well understood but really powerful "Fancy Bear" tools set gets into so many well protected networks unnoticed... Only to be found by investigators so quickly as it is so just easy to find once it is in a network...
So rather than some all powerful, hard to track, no logs, no tools left behind method is a rather common "spear phishing" event...
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A quote of Julian Assange's speculation on something is neither proof of anything nor a substantive response to an assertion. This may come as a surprise to you, but the standards of informed, rational discourse are much higher than snarky statements that seem to cast doubt on something. You'll fit in nicely with the rest of the internet's idiot choir.
Not bad, looks like a clean record to me. (Score:1)
Looking at the details, it looks like the positives in the US database were related to treament of injuries plus one gymnast with an ADHD diagnosis. Whereas, as far as we can tell, the Russian athletes were being dosed with more conventional doping agents that have no general use in Russia for non-athletes, and were forbidden to be tested for exactly that reason.
So I see the hack results as so far posted as a vindication for the US Olympic teams. Either they were remarkably clean or they were unusually goo
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plus one gymnast with an ADHD diagnosis
That's some crafty spinning on your part. That "one gymnast" is no other than Simone Biles. One of the most prominent stars of the Olympics. And, apparently, she was doping her entire life [bbc.com]
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Too bad almost none of the commentators understand common facts about sports physiology and pharmacology. For example, the CORTICOsteroids given the tennis players for injuries would tend to make them weaker, not stronger (it is the ANDROGEN type steroids that are used by dopers), And it's dubious that Ritalin would help a gymnast, though it might an endurance athlete.
Re:Not bad, looks like a clean record to me. (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's dubious that Ritalin would help a gymnast, though it might an endurance athlete.
Are you high?! (sorry, can't help it)
And it's not just Ritalin. For years she was scarfing Adderall and Dexedrine too. All stimulants. All banned.
Taking this to extreme: let's attach a jet pack to Steven Hawking's chair (under doctor's prescription) and let him compete in 100m sprint. Although it would be fun to watch, it would definitely be unfair to other athletes.
And that is my point: occasionally taking drugs to overcome injuries is totally fine by me. But taking them for years gives an unfair advantage - exactly what anti-doping tries to prevent.
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It is just like a decade ago or so a lot of sportsmen officially had asthma so they could take clenbuterol legally. Except that someone with actual asthma is unlikely to excel in an endurance sport.
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All of those drugs are amphetamine analogs used to treat ADHD, or are you going to try and say that her ADHD diagnosis was faked?
https://www.drugs.com/ritalin.... [drugs.com]
https://www.drugs.com/adderall... [drugs.com]
https://www.drugs.com/cdi/dexe... [drugs.com]
Both of my kids, and I have ADHD, I have taken all of these except Adderall, and they had varying effects on my attention issues. Perhaps we should just ban treatment of any issues with athletes, they should just not use any medications?
These people used medications in the course of
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Too bad almost none of the commentators understand common facts about sports physiology and pharmacology. For example, the CORTICOsteroids given the tennis players for injuries would tend to make them weaker, not stronger.
Serena took Prednisone, which is a corticosteroids, that's true, but the problem is that she was positive to two Prednisone active metabolites [wikipedia.org]: Prednisolone and Methylprednisolone. Those are steroids (who could think that Serena took steroids?) and in this case she was cleared because she can say "I didn't take those banned substances, I'm positive as a side effect of that other substance, allowed under restrictions". It is Lance Armstrong all over again to me.
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This willful display of continued ignorance as to the different kinds of steroids does prove my point above.
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does that [dailymail.co.uk] really look clean to you?
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In Soviet Russia, this shit believes YOU!
ADHD superhumans? (Score:1)
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Funny thing, people with ADHD respond in exactly the opposite way to these drugs as people without the drug. If you have ADHD and take a stimulant, it has the effect of calming you, not of improving your performance in any way.
There are tests to determine if someone has ADHD, to claim that someone is just taking the drugs to compete better is a really odd thing to say.
So, how is the weather in Moscow? I see they suggested you create accounts now so that you aren't as easily disbelieved.
OP is making stuff up (Score:5, Insightful)
WADA (not a reliable source) said they were hacked by Russians. They did not say they were hacked by Russia.
Why wasn’t the WADA info public? (Score:2)
This woman is not on steroids .. (Score:1)
The usual anti-Russian distraction (Score:1)
The usual anti-Russian witch hunt, when publically confronted with some unpallitible facts, regarding their own action. It does look clear that this leaked information should have been public to begin with, given its clear implications for the credibility of WADA. We clearly can't have some athletes using banned substances, while others can not.
Now that WADA has made these claims, they also better deliver some actal evidence, or their credibility will only sink further. They also better look at their polici
PHB Syndrome (Score:2)
This would be the only reason not to have stuff like this physically walled-off from the net. What, do they dump their results directly onto Twitter?