After raid on Covid whistleblower, it’s revealed password was on FL DoH website | Hacker News Reader

After raid on Covid whistleblower, it’s revealed password was on FL DoH website

grahamcluley.com

44 pointsrbanffy21 comments

Florida's solution to having incompetent sysadmins is to send armed thugs to terrorize peoples' families. Pretty on-brand if you ask me.

Ah, it's another entry to the good old "Google search for 'Florida' + your birth month and day and see what happened" lol

Seems Google has them cached still: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.flo...

These are pretty bad passwords as well, even though I guess it doesn't matter that much if there are no individual user accounts anyways.

I've been in a situation before where "the boss" demands this configuration, an easy password so everyone can remember it, and it's the keys to the kingdom, and everything you need to get admin access to the whole thing.

I'm not going to talk about how it went for me, but I will say it's hard to stand up and say "no, we can't put it on the internet like this" especially when you are not the boss, and it has already been done, what you need to do to make it better is essentially shouting "stop the presses" running up and down the hallway - and is it even the most important problem on the table?

This whistleblower has a lot of courage to continue to stand up against a corrupt, badly malfunctioning state apparatus, from my perspective anyway.

Remember this is in a country that is running a pretty decent chance of being about to having a landslide democratic election overturned by the courts.

Very, very brave.

Please don't exaggerate or fear monger. There is no "pretty decent chance". It was never even remotely possible (as much as a minority of rabid followers of someone wish it to be).

That depends on which news you watch. I'm with you, I don't want to acknowledge that there is any chance. But I've just spent the week with my folks who leave Fox News on in the background for most of the day, and I'd say now my sentiment is much closer to "nevertheless, they persisted" – people really buy into this stuff.

And it's not a decisive minority of people either, not in either of the places I've lived in my lifetime. Certainly the vote reflects that it was a minority, nationwide, but "have you ever actually seen a million dollars"?

Even of those that know it shouldn't be possible, regardless there are many who are still hopeful it gets overturned. (Still, thank you for saying what I'm thinking.)

There have been two Republican senators willing to admit Biden won the election - the entire rest of the party doesn’t find an election they lost legitimate. Republican congressman in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and several other states are attempting to introduce legislation that would force states to overturn free and fair elections, while their supporters phone in bomb threats to ballot counting centers and democratic headquarters, and their TV stations continue to pump out propaganda with no basis in reality. This is also the same party that has seen notable success in radicalizing young white men to commit terrorist acts. Oh, and republicans are closing polling places in Georgia, because too many black people voted.

When looking at the situation, it’s hard for me to see how you feel it’s only a tiny minority of trump followers, as opposed to the entirety of the Republican Party - especially when the leadership of the party on down is pushing full steam ahead in a single coordinated effort.

It’s especially hard for me to understand how you think this is normal and healthy for a democracy, and why being alarmed is “fear-mongering” and “exaggeration”.

I think an honest acknowledgement of the current political situation would find you are trying to downplay the situation and threat that sabotaging democracy represents.

Have you read the actual suit? [1]

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

I don’t think you’re getting my point. Democracy does not, can not, or ever be based solely on the written laws of a country. Democracies rely just as much (and more) on the norms of power sharing and loyal opposition as they do on laws around elections and who is allowed to vote.

Citing evidence that a party is intentionally destroying norms just underscores my argument.

I wouldn't trust this Supreme Court to do the Right Thing.

To be fair, they did the right thing in dismissing it. They could completely demolish it though.

Most residential customers are not assigned fixed IP addresses. Due to network churn the IP address assigned to a residential machine will change over time. As such you will usually need more information other than just the IP to identify a machine on a network at a point in time. So what is the deal? Was the IP assignment fixed? Did the police acquire the ISP logs for the IP assignment or DHCP? How do they know that the IP in the web server logs wasn't from some middle box or LB in front of the webserver?

Subpoena for DHCP assignment logs and subscriber information has been a standard law enforcement tool for decades.

I can tell you that's pretty much the first thing they ask.

I don't really see the relevance. AFAIK they have an IP address which matches her, which a judge considered good enough reason to seize her equipment and double check.

An IP address retrieved from the Apache logs by the same sysadmins who put unhashed credentials online in a place where they could be indexed by Google?

They should have no easy way to match the IP the ISP assigned her.

They didn't take the router, just her phone and computer which won't show the public IP.

Was the IP address 127.0.0.1 perhaps?

I've got the same combination on my luggage!

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