Secrecy mounts over White House cybersecurity staff shakeup | Hacker News Reader

Secrecy mounts over White House cybersecurity staff shakeup

zdnet.com

58 pointscpeterso17 comments

This story has been flagged, and I think that's a shame. I understand the concerns about turning HN into another political discussion rant forum. However, this is relevant news to this audience, for two reasons:

- It's about the CISO of a high-profile establishment, and his team.

- National cybersecurity policies are likely to impact the decisions that the software and hardware folks of us will make over the coming years.

I think I'd rather Trump just rolled the Whitehouse back to Battle Star Galactia feeling hardlines and no-microprocessors period level security.

You know, classic, tangible, "built to last" stuff.

It would be amazing if they went back to typewriters as being 'unhackable' devices.

> It would be amazing if they went back to typewriters as being 'unhackable' devices.

Considerable amounts of money and expertise have been thrown at sound analysis, and it's used in a range of situations from telling what submarine is in your waters to knowing what a typist is typing.

And eventually people put parallel ports on typewriters because typists are more expensive than a parallel port, at which point you've got a cumbersome but very hackable printer.

Researchers recover typed text from audio recording: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7448976

Acoustic snooping: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2005/09/09/acoustic-snooping-t...

And Germany was thinking of trying exactly this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/109...

An interesting tangent: sound can be recovered from visual information too:

Algorithm recovers speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass - http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibr...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10968604/The-NSA-...

The gist is that typewriters aren't really that much more safe. You still have a weak human element, and it's also easy to bug a typewriting machine.

Only if they go all the way back to mechanical typewriters.

"... in 1985 Soviet spies installed secret "keystroke loggers" and antennas in at least 13 typewriters in the US Embassy in Moscow to detect and transmit the typing patterns of embassy secretaries. "

In all seriousness I feel like the administration is already compromised so why would they need any Cyber Security. It seems they have a very close and personal relationship with Putin and Russia. Could they have also given up the two Russian Security guys that were passing information on to the previous administration as a gift to Putin for his help in the election?

This story just gets more interesting all the time.

Not a fan of Trump's policies, actions or attitudes here, but this 'article' wasn't much more than a series of rumours, guesses and third had accounts gathered together on one page. One could infer many things from this story, and that does a disservice to the journalism profession.

If providers are serious about stamping out the constant cries of 'fake news', I would like to think that articles be more well researched, and solid & verifiable proof of evidence is found, and presented in a way that cannot be refuted or challenged.

Really? Other than two sentences from an anonymous source, everything in the article is verifiable. The story itself is fairly opaque, but then that's what the article is reporting, that it isn't clear why the CISO left, and that neither the WH or the man himself will comment.

They don't offer any guesses, and even the headline stresses that they don't know.

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