The doomscrolling stops here. This is the kind of thing that can keep you up at night (13 minute video in the embed):
Here are the main takeaways:
- The man being interviewed is Charlie Kraiger, a cybersecurity specialist for the White House,
- His date was James O’Keefe of O’Keefe Media Group, whose only disguise was dyed hair and glasses,
- Charlie spills about Biden’s declining mental state,
- He also spills that the current administration is not confident that Biden will win, but that he will be nominated anyway, by nature of being the incumbent,
- He blabs about how they considered removing Kamala from the ticket because she was so unpopular, but are keeping her on over intersectional optics,
- And, oh boy, is she unpopular. So much so, that even black staff members quit en masse because of her,
- Charlie is a sincere Covid cultist, telling other dates to bugger off because they didn’t want to get the vaccine,
- Again, Charlie Kraiger is a cybersecurity specialist for the White House.
What is the state of cybersecurity in the White House when one of their guys spills the beans to James O’Keefe in a Clark Kent disguise?
Just how safe is our country? Who knows what all else that Charlie could have said in a busy coffee shop, where a Russian agent could have been sitting nearby?
And why do I get the idea that the guy was hired because he prefers sausages over roast beef sandwiches?
Presumably, the guy somehow got a security clearance. As for how he got it, I don’t know. but I’d like to imagine that, after this fiasco, it was immediately revoked, and he was entrusted with corrosion prevention.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t intend to pick a fight with White House cybersecurity. Those guys probably know what kind of exquisite artistry that I look up.
But I’m kinda concerned, because these are the guys that the rest of us count on for protection to not be dumb, at least for their own sakes. I’d like to imagine that they’d practice basic opsec, such as using virtual machines. But after this, I have my doubts.
Let’s get into why this incident is worrisome.
If your idea of hacking came from movies, you probably think that the majority of hacking is opening a command prompt and then keyboarding away at some code, or some shit. And maybe much of it still is. But there’s a new kid in town: social engineering.
Sure, you can go to the trouble of typing up some malicious code, and hoping that your intrusion attempt goes unnoticed. But the fact is, data security measures have gotten pretty sophisticated. You know what’s easier? Tricking people.
And that’s just what social engineering is.
If someone calls you up at work, identifying themselves as IT and asking for your password, you should be a little suspicious, even if they call it “routine” or relax you by bringing up the sports scores. If you answer them honestly, then you just gave away your account.
Or there’s this one: tricking people on social media. Like showing a chart with anime characters by month, then saying “Your birth month determines which anime character you are!”, then stupid people take to the comments and give away their birth month. Then, on another post, they give away something like the day of the month they were born on, or otherwise give away their age or other personally identifiable information that can be pieced together with other personally identifiable information that they just give away.
Stuff that could be used to impersonate them.
Or stupid shit like “If you put together the name of the first street you lived on and the name of your first pet, that’s your superhero name”, and then people proceed to give the answers to their bank account security questions.
Do you see the issue? When you have datasec measures that are as advanced as they’ve become, their biggest weakness is people.
It’s because of this that your most important datasec skill is knowing when to keep your mouth shut, especially when the person sitting across from you looks just like James O’Keefe wearing glasses.
It becomes more important still when 330 million people are counting on you to not be a dumbass.
But if the White House is staffed by people as bright as Charlie Kraiger, this country is in trouble.
Magnetricity 