 Russian hysteria infects Washington Post again, false story about hacking the U.S. election get. This has been driving me crazy. Everyone's pointing their fingers, yelling, Russian hacker this, Russian hacker that. And I actually think the deeper reason is, their security sucks. And blaming the Russians for your sucky security seems like a better scapegoat than you're an idiot. And I hate to say it like that, talking about our politicians and things like that that are getting in trouble, but they're doing really, really bad security practices. There's a reason some larger companies, let's say Google, for instance, isn't losing millions of users, pieces of information. It's because they understand security better and a lot of our government does not. Very much so. And we're gonna point that out here in the next few. Now granted, Glenn Greenwald, may know him, may have heard of the guy. He's represented WikiLeaks, he's represented Snowden. We've had a lot of information passed through his hands and yes, he does have an axe to grind. And that's because of this from 2011, which was the H.B. Geary incident. Spend some time reading about it. You'll be dumbfounded at the length our government was going through to literally, we're gonna just read this here. This is from H.B. Geary's plan of attack to simply discredit journalists overseas to stop them working with WikiLeaks. They were targeting Glenn to try to stop. So our government was going to quash free speech of a journalist for talking about WikiLeaks and create a series of false documents against WikiLeaks to try and frame them. This was our government hiring H.B. Geary. It was an entire disaster because they attacked Anonymous, the hacker group, hacktivist group and Anonymous pretty much owned them and then dumped all their files on the internet. So that being said, let's talk about this electric kid thing. We'll start from here. So you can actually read all this, Propaganda, it's a top news story today just before the new year that Russians hacked it. But let's go to the source of where this information came from, Burlington Electric. This is Jim Acosta, ACNN course, White House correspondent. Surely he's got some journalist integrity because he must have read the link. He posted the link and the link brings us over to the Burlington Electric kid. Who? Let's read this clearly. This is the place that claims to be hacked. 17 hours ago. The story is breaking all over the place right now, right? Last night utilities were alerted by the Department of Homeland Security of a mailware code used in Grizzly Step. The name of the DHS has applied to a Russian campaign linked to the recent hacks. We acted quickly, scanned all computers in our system, mailware signature. We detected a mailware signature in a single Burlington Electric department laptop not connected to the organization's grid system. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials, blah, blah, blah. Please note not connected. That's a very important part. They have a lot of employees. They have a lot of systems. This one wasn't connected to the network, therefore not really a big deal. And also, blaming Russians for everything. I have Russian mailware on computers that come in my office. That's kind of like saying, oh, you're probably using a Chinese computer. Yeah, stuff's made in China. And you know what's made in Russia? Not computers, but mailware. That's actually the big thing Russia exports. Not a lot of our stuff go in Russia. They export mailware. Why? It's not illegal there. Stealing money from US people, which is the majority what the mailware does, steals credit cards and takes money. Not illegal in Russia. Or maybe not illegal, but not enforced because it's a one-way street. They take money out of Americans' pockets by defrauding them through these different mailware scams and then they carry the money over to Russia. And it was the last time you bought anything else from Russia. That's where the bad guys hang out because it's legal there. Russia and some of the neighboring states there. So let's go to the DNC and just break down some of the stupidity that goes on in here. And I love the picture they got right here. That space says it all. How Podesta got hacked and how not to let it happen to you? Yes, it's not hard not to let it happen to you. You can read all the details here. And I'm gonna link all these links in here on box and then break down in detail how not to let it happen to you. Let's just go right to the source here. That's his password. Yep, he has password and he swapped the O for a zero and the A for an at symbol. And he got scammed. That's it. They sent him an email. It turns out that he used that same password on lots of places too. So here's the guy who is working at the highest levels of government, not using two-factor authentication, not using the most basic security practices, has a super simple password. You guys are running around claiming around Russia. All these websites, oh my gosh, the bad guys, the Russian hackers, they're so clever. They guessed that he put password as his password and then used it for everything. That face spot on. So then we have more of these details about the scandal of DNC. And this is where it gets even stupider to me. This is just the DNC's fumbling in the encounter with the FBI. Basically, the FBI called them. They didn't think it was the FBI. They thought it was a joke. And so the FBI's low-key approach meant Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee's network for seven months before the top DNC officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyber experts. Let's take a moment to think about this. You are running for president. You didn't have experts setting up your IT network. Blame the Russians, because saying that in a congressional meeting makes you sound kind of dumb that you didn't hire good people. You didn't have two-factor authentication. You didn't have basic security that I have in place and you were running for president of the United States. Okay, this is just... So even look at the Cinema Spoofed email. There was something sent back and forth and they basically goofed it and said, oh, I guess you can open an email. And that's a whole breakdown here on The New York Times. It's ridiculous. Then we go a step further. Oops, DNC continued to email passwords after they knew they had been hacked. This is one of the things, I covered this in my podcast because this was absolutely hysterical to me that they just, at every level, they fail that security at the most basic level. They knew they had a hacker. They sent group emails to the group to change the password and let everybody know what the new password is. When you have a hacker inside your organization, he probably has an email address on the group list or has someone on the group list has their account access. And they did. So they kept changing the password, thinking that will fix their security when instead they were just emailing out the new password to the hacker who go, oh, no, I can't get in. Oh, there comes that group email. I got in again. I mean, just, they failed at every level. So people think there's some, oh, it's this big cyber-criminal thing. What are we gonna do? The government needs to save us from these people. They need to be safe from themselves. There is no, you were emailing passwords after you knew you'd been hacked. That's because these people don't understand technology. That is the problem. They're not taking the most basic. They look at technology as an inconvenience. They will do the minimum necessary to get it working, but not any further. They're like, look, we gotta spend money anywhere else but technology, because that's just a, it's just nothing, right? May have lost your presidency though. So let's talk about our government that you want to save us from this. Government do what? You want Obama to do something about it? Good. Ask him to figure out how we can fix all the problems the government has. Hacking the government exposed 21.5 million people. They lost the records to 21.5 million people. They had social security numbers, fingerprints, basically all the government employees, all the federal employees, just a giant disaster in this database is now for sale. So not only have your social security, date of birth, lots of personal information, they also have a copy of your fingerprints. They can print out. That's how big the database breach our government who you were asking to protect us from these hackers did because they are not doing proper security. They failed their own internal audits for security, so it was just a matter of time before the system got cracked. And of course it did, then this was the, you know, this is from a little while ago, but that had other implementations because let's talk about the CIA will protect us, right? Oh, no, he's got an AOL account. Here's the CIA director getting his account owned. So this is CIA director, John Brennan. He had this, a kid, a hacker who claims to have broken an AOL account, which we know he had his AOL account broken. Between getting information from the SF86 applications, which were from this hack, he had the personal information guy. Cause yes, even a CIA director, fills out a form that goes into the OPM database that was stolen because the government didn't secure it properly. So now it allowed hackers, and this information's been around for a while, to have more information, to call Verizon and get his cell phone number reset so they could then do a password reset on this. So this is what drives me nuts. If you go to Google right now, I can just pop up the Google news and it's gonna be just filled with Russian hacker this or Russian hacker that. And they're all upset about this. The most basic levels of security have been ignored. Russian linked malware found an electronic laptop. Apparently they haven't read the post that it was a laptop owned by them, but the connection's really, really good. But man, this makes a great clickable headline. And that's a lot of what the goal is here is to make headlines because you've got to have a reason to click on all these links because then they get money from ads. It's kind of how that works for them. And the churn continues. And no one wants to really admit that the guy who linked all the DNC stuff and just the perfect caption of his face, his password, he had simply substituted the A with an at symbol and the O with a zero and set his password to that. It's not, it doesn't take a criminal organization. I mean, a kid could probably guess his password. And I think the most shocking thing, and I've read it through some of these, what shocks some of the other hackers sometimes is we didn't expect a pastor to be that dumb. And not only is it that dumb, they find out that his password worked everywhere. So they go log into other systems because people tend to use the same passwords everywhere. I have an entire video telling people not to do this and talking about software that's been around for years that'll manage passwords for you. And here are the people at the top of the government completely not using any of that type of software. It's a giant disaster, it's a mess, it's a shame. And it's kind of embarrassing for someone, because I work in tech, I understand this better. And I know not everyone is going to be super tech savvy, but if you're running the government, you're top officials in the government, please get a pastor manager, use two-factor authentication. Oh, and journalists, please give us a little, you know, a bit of integrity. Like right here, I'm at the source of the Burlington Electric Department where they say not connected to the grid laptop. Look, laptops get infected with malware. Rush is the number one place for malware. If it gets infected, statistical probability, it's got to rush your malware on it. That's how malware works. I know, we fix malware. That's where they're working. So to sum all this up, I have all my notes that I'll leave in there. And it's just security in 2016 and coming into 2017. I don't hold a lot of hope that it's gonna be better. But please just don't blame it all on the Russians. Change your password from password. Use two-factor authentication, use common sense. So this stuff doesn't happen. It's a little bit less embarrassing and hopefully we're gonna get a little bit smarter. I'm crossing my fingers. I'm an optimist, a die-hard optimist after reading this, I guess. But yep, that's my thoughts on Russian hysteria and quit blaming the Russians on your bad security. Just get better at security. Spend a little bit of money on infrastructure, IT and understanding that your life will be better, thank you. Well, if you like the content here or me ranting, like and subscribe.