John Kelly's phone was breached as early as December
thehill.com
thehill.com
Then why did he bring it to the White House IT team because it stopped working/updating?
Edit: To clarify, it's not that he took it to the White House IT team (that's appropriate). It's the question of why he would notice if it wasn't working, the type of technical complaint described in the articles seems to argue a little against him not using it at all.
I've added an edit to provide the clarity that should've been there initially.
I don't know that's what happened, but it's certainly plausible. If it is, it speaks well for Kelly's powers of observation (noticing that the phone was behaving in an unusual way) and ability to choose a proper course of action (taking it to the security professionals at the White House, rather than, as someone else noted, Geek Squad or whatever minimum wage clerk was manning the counter at the Verizon store).
How about any number of several dozen extremely obvious possibilities. A family photo album is on the personal phone and he wanted to retrieve it, so he used the phone and noticed something was wrong with it. He needed to retrieve contact information for a friend that was stored on it. You know, the same exact reasons any of us might fire up an old phone we still have.
Which is...?
A White House spokesman said Kelly hadn’t used the personal phone often since joining the administration. This official said Kelly relied on his government-issued phone for official communications.
The official, who did not dispute any of POLITICO’s reporting on the timeline of events or the existence of the memo, said Kelly no longer had possession of the device but declined to say where the phone is now.
Kelly has since begun using a different phone, one of the officials said, though he relies on his government phone when he’s inside the White House.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/05/john-kelly-cell-pho...
"often" makes all the difference.
On the bright side, it's not likely that an APT/nation state actor was responsible. Breaking things is pretty amateur hour.
Then again, maybe his phone sucked and they just wanted him to get one with a better mic/camera. Perhaps whatever compromising selfies were not of sufficient quality.
I'm pretty sure that when nation state actors compromise a high-level target's phone, they avoid breaking things in such obvious fashion.
CYBERCOM did launch a DDoS attack against North Korea recently, and it is strongly suspected that they have done so previously (like in retaliation to the Sony hack).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump...
True, but the NSA did accidentally brick the Syrian border routers.
Or else my phone line would click every 15 seconds and forget to ring when calling someone just for the hell of it
And that's worrying. We need to raise our expectations for our leaders, especially those with high security clearance.
Seems like there should be some kind of "digital maintenance and security" primer before receiving access to national secrets.
The article certainly doesn't say that.
They don't even get to a), as a rule.
If he had been using or carrying the phone and it was a failure on the recent update that alerted him then it represents two problems: an operational security one and a scandal.
I hope that his integrity holds up on this one.
As you say, though, that makes him more culpable if it turns out he has actually been using the phone. But my money says he hasn't been.
I'm not confused by that, I just plain disagree.
Remember, only recently we saw fixes released for some pretty serious Wi-Fi vulnerabilities. A close-access attack on a bigh value target like him is not out of the realm of possibility.
is there a DB some place that has all the satallittes and their respective owners/services/orbits/launch-dates/etc that is available to the public, even if incomplete and salted with bullshit?
A new constellation of 66 Iridium satellites with more bandwidth is being launched. This will take eight launches. Two launches so far; the third launch is in 2 days, using a Space-X Falcon 9.
There are web sites with satellite orbital data.[1]
1. https://www.verizonwireless.com/biz/security/wireless-privat...
2. https://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/business-program...
Network Effect "law" says that the network's usefulness rises exponentially with its reach.
Or does it need spelling out?