[Infowarrior] - That NBC (hacking) story is 100% fraudulent

[Richard Forno]

That NBC story 100% fraudulent

By Robert Graham

http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/02/that-nbc-story-100-fraudulent.html

Yesterday (Feb 5 2014) NBC News ran a story claiming that if you bring your mobile phone or laptop to the Sochi Olympics, it'll immediately be hacked the moment you turn it on. The story was fabricate. The technical details relate to going to the Olympics in cyberspace (visiting websites), not going to their in person and using their local WiFi.

The story shows Richard Engel "getting hacked" while in a cafe at Sochi. It is wrong in every respect.
	• They aren't actually in Sochi (they are in Moscow).
	• The "hack" happens because of the websites they visit (Olympic themed websites), not their physical location. The results would've been the same in America.
	• The phone didn't "get" hacked; Richard Engel initiated the download of a hostile Android app onto his phone.

I had expected the story to be about the situation with WiFi in Sochi, such as man-in-the-middle attacks inserting the Blackhole toolkit into web pages exploiting the latest Flash 0day. But the story was nothing of the sort.

Instead, the hacking in the story was due to the hostility of Olympic themed websites. The only increased danger from being in Russia is geolocation. Google uses your IP address to increase the of rank local sites, so you'll see more dodgy Russian sites in the results. You can disable this feature in your Google account settings.

Absolutely 0% of the story was about turning on a computer and connecting to a Sochi network. 100% of the story was about visiting websites remotely. Thus, the claim of the story that you'll get hacked immediately upon turning on your computers is fraudulent. The only thing that can be confirmed by the story is "don't let Richard Engel borrow your phone".

That leaves us with the same advice that we always give people:
	• don't click on stuff
	• patch your stuff (browser, Flash, PDF)
	• get rid of the really bad stuff (Oracle's Java)
	• don't click on stuff
	• oh, and if you really are in Sochi, use VPN over the public WiFi

I gleaned these details from Kyle Wilhoit, the expert quoted in the story, and his Twitter feed. He's working on a blog with the full technical details. I'm sure it'll be great, with lots of details about what hackers can find with Maltego, the dangers of hostile websites, and so on -- the sort of great information totally lost in the nonsense that is the NBC story.


By the way, the easy way to figure out where journalists commit fraud is by watching for "passive voice". Journalists normally avoid passive voice, preferring stronger language. But, when they need to hide things, they passive voice to cover up details. Saying "was hacked" covers up the fact that Richard Engel hacked himself by knowingly downloading a hostile Android app. In other word, active voice wouldn't have worked, because it would have required identifying who put the virus on the phone. He couldn't report that a "hacker put the virus on the phone" because the hacker didn't, Richard Engel did. He couldn't very well have reported, in the active voice, "I downloaded the virus". Thus, the passive voice, "the phone was hacked", avoiding this inconvenient detail of who did what.


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.