2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: No surprise: Tech sites aren't buying DNC hysteria on breech [View all]LiberalArkie
(16,032 posts)by Chris Johnson (580)
NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.
A guy whos now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldnt happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. Thats a bad call but by information security standards its not unthinkable: itd be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.
One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to stealing on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. Its the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder whats up and more relevantly whats being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewalls going down like that.
The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasnt hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.
I think thats accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not its suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.
In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, thats part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didnt necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and hes not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)
And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because its a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didnt himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.