*If you've lived as long as I have, and seen this trouble predictably, steadily, mounting for decades, these stories are plenty bad. From Electronic Frontier to Electronic Decadence without ever accomplishing law and order. The scale and size of these disorders and scandals, the lack of credibility of everyone involved, they should properly be frightening.
Call it Motherboard’s Cyber Jealousy list. A humble hat tip to our favorite stories from our fierce competitors. It’s a tribute to the journalists and the stories that gave us a bit of envy, pushed us to be better, and best served the public interest.
Without further ado, here’s a very incomplete list of our favorite stories about hacking and information security that we loved, and that we wish we had done ourselves.
Kaspersky's 'Slingshot' Report Burned An Isis-focused Intelligence Operation (Cyberscoop)
What is a cybersecurity firm’s responsibility around not exposing certain hacking operations? Here, Cyberscoop showed that sometimes companies do decide to unmask campaigns targeting arguably legitimate threats, such as terrorists. We also explored this dilemma in our feature on Kaspersky Lab a few weeks after Chis Bing and Patrick O’Neill’s scoop.
The CIA's Communications Suffered A Catastrophic Compromise. It Started In Iran. (Yahoo News)
The US government and its intelligence apparatus suffered a deadly blow in China in 2011 and 2012, when more than two dozen CIA sources and informants were killed. But it all started in Iran in 2009, when hackers broke into a CIA “internet-based covert communications system,” as revealed in this bombshell report by Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin.
How Persian Gulf Rivals Turned US Media Into Their Battleground (BuzzFeed News)
Sometimes the best weapon a hacker can use is not an exploit or phishing kit, but the media. If you can discredit your enemy through the relatively cheap method of enticing a journalist with a scoop, you’re onto a winning strategy. Just look at how Guccifier 2.0—a persona allegedly created by the Russian government—distributed the hacked Democrats material too.
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Mysterious $15,000 'GrayKey' Promises To Unlock iPhone X For The Feds... (((etc etc etc)))
