John Podesta’s Twitter account was “hacked” yesterday (10/12). I put the word hacked in scare quotes because unless the following is elaborate disinformation, it would seem that the attacker was a 4chan poster who gained access to John Podesta’s iPad, iCloud storage, etc using his Apple ID and password which were in the body of one of the WikiLeaks released hacked emails.
The tweet contains an obvious 4chan connection — the shout out, “Hi pol.”
“Pol” refers to /pol/ (4chan’s “politically incorrect” board). The 4chan thread has since been deleted but it is archived here. Below is a screen shot from the thread which shows one poster talking about the source of the credentials used to access Podesta’s Apple account and ultimately, his Twitter account.
CNN reports that the intrusion was confirmed by Hillary traveling press secretary Nick Merrill.
Just a quick note on basic security. If you don’t want froathy-mouthed alt-right clowns pouring over your private emails on WikiLeaks courtesy of Putin and friends and smearing your friends as “anti-Catholic,” then do not email passwords and if you receive a password in an email, delete it immedately.
What is perhaps most shocking about this to me is that assuming that the 4chan thread isn’t elaborate disinformation, despite being hacked, John Podesta didn’t change every single password to every single account he had.
Is he not being advised by somebody from the FBI or CrowdStrike?
I was able to locate the email — which I will not link here — in the Podesta Emails archive. The below image shows the relevant part of the email at WikiLeaks with the password obscured by me.
It seems reasonable to assume that whoever was responsible for the Podesta email hack also saw this email and also gained all the same access as the 4chan poster did.
Making matters worse for Podesta and the Hillary Campaign, there are possibly documents, contacts, etc that have fallen into the hand of yet another individual or group.
Is there any end to this in sight?
Toward the end of 4chan thread, a poster claiming to be the intruder remote wipes the device.
Somebody please get Mr. Podesta’s electronic affairs in order. There’s an election in under a month and some of us are really hoping that Donald Trump doesn’t win it.