CIA boss uses AOL email – and I hacked it, claims stoner teen

No problem here. As we all know these agency heads are just puppets.

There's absolutely no way that kiddos are going to be able to hack into the emails of the real movers and shakers. Don't even try to look at Hillary's email accounts. Or Petreaus's.

And, in the end, the NSA and equivalent Chinese, Isreali, Russian, Indian, and Hobbitland agencies have already recorded and analyzed the content. Nothing to see.

Social Engineering at its best

Mitnick would be proud.

Verizon should be ashamed.

And AOL, well, let's just say after many years of people making fun of them, things haven't changed.

Both.

Put them both in prison.

and you thought Family Guy was a joke, another case of life imitating i guess.

Typical teenager..

.. absolutely no sense of danger. Mine plays rugby as if bones were meant to be broken.

Want to bet he's suddenly legally not a minor when they catch him?

On obsolescence and technical incompetence.

Can't understand why CIA, FBI and untold flocks of journalist would be after that kid. He only exposed a bad habit of a old man copying mail here and there. Eh? what do you say? Security? Secrets?

Still wonder why we still trust some tech-inept to manages high security information. System is flawed, and the world is chasing the ones that find where it's leaking to put them in jail.

If correct isolation process would have have been in place, that kid would have found tits and viagra spam only like in everyone's email. End of the story.

Just my 2 cents.

Alessio

Honeypot

You think those were _real_ sensitive files? Surely with someone in that position, you'd have a pre-packed setup with fake info ready to hand over should the need arise. A bit like truecrypt's hidden containers.

Boss of CIA using an A Oh helL email account... [chuckle] that's a good one!

You think thats bad..

Once found national security sensitive (specifically Mars related) data on a memory card found on greedbay.

I went through most of the other cards and found all sorts of goodies, actually got a couple of the dead ones going again by overvoltaging them by 0.2V and obtained some fascinating data.

Sometimes gently heating them helps dry them out and make the conducting casing caused by moisture getting in once again insulating.

So if you do happen to come across an apparently dead memory card, its well worth trying to see what can be salvaged especially with the tendency of drones to fly apart in mid air and eject their sometimes-perfectly-good microSD into Never-Never Land.

I'm not sure which is funnier...

That they may have got into the director of the CIA's AOL account(!) or that they think US foreign-policy is too pro-Palestine!

The boss of the CIA has work emails in his personal AOL account.

Work emails in his personal email account *facepalm*

He uses AOL *double facepalm*

Instant dismissal is required.

Hillary must be so happy... Using you own mail server is way much safer than using AOL.. like the spy master does..

Prison will do him good

Ten years in the slammer should do this cracka good.

' "We are aware of the reports that have surfaced on social media and have referred the matter to the appropriate authorities," a CIA spokesperson told The Register on Monday. '

Hmmm, nothing makes the authorities angrier than embarrassing them in public. I would get your affairs in order kiddo, you're going to be doing a lot of sitting in small rooms and thinking about stuff, before they pack you off to jubbie to dig ditches for the local authority in some backwater hick county.

It's not a generational thing.

Brennan's use of a commercial email system isn't due to a lack of security understanding due to his age - some of us of that generation wrote the tools we all use today - it's specifically lazy and sloppy to maintain sensitive content on an AOL email account.

Brennan by the nature of his profession knows better and yet failed to take precautions. It is scary that these individuals are tasked to maintain our safety - they can't even manage their electronic communications.

What is it about stoners and hacking?

Does smoking pot give people hacking superpowers or something?

Password Reset

I'm older than he is, and have had 3 or more email accounts since at least the mid 1990s.

Different accounts for "over the transom and spam", "Work related", and "Doctor and bank", to start with. Only one (guess which) has the ability to use an automagic process for resetting the password, and that process uses two factor ID.

Do most folks forget their passwords so often that a slightly more secure reset policy would be a burden?