Political Misfits Discussion of UK Russian Hacking Report (7/21/2010)

Lebanon Crisis Worsens; UK Report Targets Russia; Trump Sending Federal Agents to Chicago

Dr. Hicham Safieddine, professor of the history of the modern Middle East at King’s College London, has the latest on Lebanon's economic woes. Lebanon has not been spared in the coronavirus crisis, but unluckily for the country, the virus hit amid a slowly building economic crisis that seems to have suddenly hit the gas over the past few months, with electricity being cut to a few hours a day, food prices rising so high and so fast that they’re going beyond the reach of some citizens, the Lebanese pound losing 80% of its value over the course of the last year and the country’s banks and citizens running out of foreign currency. That Lebanon is in a serious crisis seems beyond doubt. But how did the country get here?

Jim Kavanagh, political analyst, commentator and editor of The Polemicist, breaks down a British report targeting Russia. The UK Parliament's cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee has issued a report saying in part that "the UK took its 'eye off the ball' in relation to Russia's attempts to meddle in British politics and deliberately 'glossed over' allegations of a Kremlin-sponsored influence campaign during the Brexit referendum," CNN reported Tuesday. Some are saying that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government does not want to reveal what truly took place, while the report said that "British intelligence agencies didn't investigate as they did not see the security of [the] UK voting process as part of their role because they feared the issue was a 'hot potato,'" CNN noted. What do we make of this?
[Related articles: Investigation Nation: Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics, Be Careful What You Ask For: Wasting Time with Manafort, Cohen, and Russiagate]

Goosebumps: A Scary Sony Story

Can we bring the discussion of the Sony hack back to earth?

It’s a hack.

Somebody hacked into the Sony Pictures Entertainment computer network in Hollywood, and released to the public a treasure trove of confidential information. Everything from embarrassing emails to forthcoming movie scripts was dumped out in public. This is an embarrassment for an international (Japanese-American) media corporation and a bunch of celebrities. It may be a violation of intellectual property rights, and personal privacy rights, and common courtesy. It may be condemnable on any of those grounds. But it is not “terrorism” or “cyberwar.” It’s a hack.

It is, furthermore, a rather ordinary and foreseeable kind of hack, despite the Sony cybersecurity guy’s insistence that: "This attack is unprecedented in nature. …an unparalleled and well planned crime, carried out by an organized group, for which neither [Sony Pictures Entertainment] nor other companies could have been fully prepared,"[1]  To which one security expert, known as "The Grugq," says: “Bullshit.” Malware for such attacks can be purchased on the Internet.  A similar attack struck 30,000 computers at Aramco in Saudi Arabia and at banks and media companies in South Korea. 

In fact, Sony itself had been hacked in 2011, forced to shut down its Online Entertainment and PlayStation Networks for weeks.[2]  In a previous security audit, Jason Spaltro, Sony’s Executive Director of Information Security, was warned about the company’s cyber vulnerabilities, with an emphasis on its lax password practices (simple nouns, passed around in plaintext documents), with the blunt admonition: “If you were a bank, you’d be out of business.” To which Spaltro replied: “If a bank was a Hollywood studio, it would be out of business.”