Iran Hackers No Different

Jay Solomon had a nice piece a couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal about hacking by Iran on White House and think tank targets in the U.S.  I would have thought the White House would have learned its lesson during the first election of the President, when the Chinese hacked the campaign.  People want to know what staffers and candidates think, because they are the ones who will be advising the final winner.  Yet, they don't seem to learn.

If Hillary Clinton hasn't gotten better at this, you can bet the Chinese have hacked every person around her.  Maybe the Chinese told her Bernie Sanders' staff member got into the Democratic database that he shouldn't have been in.  They are very good at security of data pertaining to the party faithful, but not so good about policy positions and internal discussions.  It shows where their priorities are.

Iran, according to Solomon's article has been hacking people to find out how they feel about the agreement on nuclear weapons.  The people doing the hacking are not the ones who made the treaty, they are the Revolutionary Guard that reports to the Military office of the Supreme Leader.  There are a couple of aspects to this.

First, this is a good indicator that the Supreme Leader is nervous about this agreement, just as Congress is starting to express concerns about it.  Nobody likes this deal except the outgoing President, who won't be around to defend it.  Hacking the White House is pointless from that perspective.  They all love it.

But second, they shouldn't be able to hack anyone in the White House after all the hoopla surrounding the OPM, State Department, et al.  A reasonable person would think they would have learned something from that.

Somebody there needs to get their collective cyber security policies out and have a look at them.  Are we not paying attention to what occurs almost every day on the Internet?  These people seem to act as if they are either being protected, or nobody will ever find out that they are being hacked.  Maybe, they will even be gone by the time they are found out.  None of these are very thoughtful approaches to the problem of protecting information in White House computers.