Obama, McCain campaign computers hacked

[trjam]

here (http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/06/campaign.computers.hacked/index.html)


Now one would figure both of these groups would have some pretty good security protecting their stuff, but yet hacked. I am sure they were not using a suite from the local Mom and Pops store.

So it makes you wonder just how good are all the products we use. I mean it is obvious that if someone wants in, their going to get in.

[pugmug]

Workers,95% of them free.You get what you pay for.

[noone_particular]

From the article:
-{ Quote: "Another source, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, says federal investigators approached both campaigns with information the U.S. government had about the hacking, and the campaigns then hired private companies to mitigate the problem." }-
The way I read this, they were in "do it yourself" mode until they found that they had a problem. I wouldn't bet on either group having anything more than an everyday security suite installed.

[JRViejo]

Well, if Chinese Hackers Penetrate White House Computers (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,448626,00.html), taking into consideration that their system should be/is/was well fortified, is there any hope for the rest of us?

[noone_particular]

Of course there is, for several reasons.
Why would a government sponsored hacker from China or another country waste time on a PC belonging to a common user? We don't have what they're looking for.
No matter who builds the security system, it's only as good as the user. Most of us know that the user is the weak link in a security package. The people in the white house could easily assume that their computers security system is the absolute best there is (designed by the secret service or the NSA), overlook the fact that the user is part of that system, and do something stupid.
It's entirely possible that an overseas hacker could have help working on the inside, installing or releasing malicious code that's never been seen by an AV or security app.
Most of us wouldn't have anywhere near the volume of traffic to deal with that they do. We don't have to secure such a large network, or cater to the needs of that many people, or worry about which laptop or disk one of them will lose or misplace next.
As individuals, we have options available to us that would not work in that kind of environment.


The white house is a high profile target with classified data many governments would like to have. None of us could draw that much attention from some of the worlds best hackers no matter how hard we tried to.

[Dogbiscuit]

-{ Quote: "RAY DICKENSON, INTERNET SECURITY EXPERT: If I want to penetrate an organization, I'm going to send e-mails to members of that organization. It will be no problem at all for me to find somebody who's gullible enough to click on a link. Once they do that, I know the computer that I've gotten onto. I know that I'm inside that organization. And now I can start to spread within that organization." }-
(From a CNN transcript (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0811/06/sitroom.02.html) discussing this story)