This morning, in the wake of news that Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s email has been hacked along with those of other senior government members, the ABC’s Kate O’Toole spoke with me about the rise of hacking.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:04 — 5.1MB)
This material is ©2010 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, of course, but given that I provide my time for free and they don’t make the effort to make it available online, it’s only reasonable that I put it here and plug Kate O’Toole’s excellent program.
So, this “parliament house email” hack.
Do we think it’s a sophiticated state-sponosored zero-day remote OS root?
Someone running firesheep on the parliament house open wifi?
Or just someone trying ‘Timmy57’ as the password on Juila’s gmail account?
(comment written halfway thru listening to the podcast, in case you covered it already)
@Iain: I didn’t cover that question, and in the published reports so far there’s no real information that would help identify the method of attack. But if I were a betting man, I’d say it was something state-sponsored, but rather that being some remote OS root I’d put it down more to a highly-targetted PDF file. That, I’ve heard from several knowledgeable presentations recently, is the popular trick at the moment.