Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email
reuters.com
reuters.com
If they wanted to maintain access, they certainly wouldn't celebrate it publicly, which is why I assume they want to release information. But, there shouldn't be anything damning to release. ie, there ought not to be if the director is acting professionally. We'll see how the facts bear out. I also suppose it's possible they're just going for any win they can and there's nothing interesting here whatsoever, or it's a really boring secondary address or something.
EDIT: I actually misread the comment; I think we're likely in agreement. My bad.
His scandals are all about shirking job responsibilities to party and sightsee. That's not great from the FBI director but its way more normal than the rest of them.
https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...
Those times have passed. I'll restate what I said in a comment some days ago:
>> 50 years ago the press was "impeaching" presidents. Today presidents are "impeaching" the press
The current strategy is "keep the outrage hose on full blast and eventually people get desensitized". It works.
The fact that they released it publicly means that the most embarrassing part of it is just the hack in itself.
Im sure they are all doing it...
https://www.npr.org/2016/09/08/493133413/colin-powells-ways-...
Of course that pales in comparison with the practices of the GWB White House:
https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/george-w-bush-white-hous...
medical diagnoses can be incredibly useful in understanding past and future actions
>there shouldn't be anything damning to release. ie, there ought not to be if the director is acting professionally
that "if" is doing some heavy lifting given who we are discussing
Aren't these the same people who apparently used Signal with a journalist in the chat, and had military conversations in that very chat?
Color me surprised if these people haven't heard of opsec before, and mix their work/personal life all over the place.
Signal is one of the most secure communication platforms out there, but it is obviously not immune to human error or social engineering.
That might be true amongst the communication platforms available for the average Joe. It is definietly not the most secure communication platform available for someone high ranking in the USA government.
> it is obviously not immune to human error or social engineering
Nothing is immune. But there are systems more and systems less prone to these issues.
https://www.tabletmag.com/the-scroll/articles/march-25-kash-...
I have no idea why this would be the default assumption for somebody as sloppy and erratic as Patel. Look at how many people were emailing damning stuff to/from Epstein's personal email accounts from their own personal email accounts!
Or that he was participating in actively covering up the Epstein crime portfolio.
Maybe it wouldn’t be enough to get American citizens in an uproar, but the rest of the world certainly pays attention to these things.
Well over here, 30% still approve of it and they will openly praise how much money DOGE "saved us." It's quite eye opening talking to them. They live in a totally different reality
Any time they act like they disapprove of something the administration is doing, like the aimless war, they will change their tune in a few weeks when Fox gets it's talking points down.
I can honestly not come up with a single example of the distinction between 'zanmen and women' being useful besides this specific case where you really want to be able to say in 1 sentence that you identify as the same group as someone else, but that that group is subdivided into 2 groups, and you're talking about the sub-group that you're specifically not a part of.
So does Telugu.
మనము (manamu) - including the listener మేము (memu) - excluding the listener
I'm pretty sure most other Asian languages have them too.
^ https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/cisa-senior-official-...
Iran isn’t alone!! They are a quad along with China, Russia, and North Korea.
If the US had an educated administration not composed by lap dogs they would've known that attacking Iran was going to be a terrible idea.
Saddam did the same mistake in 1980.
He thought that the Iranian Kurds, the political opponents, the Iranian Arabs, civilians were going to raise against the regime.
None of this happened. None. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people, even kids, rallied around the banner. There are documented stories of 13 year olds, jumping on barbed wire to use their bodies as bridges for infantry. Disgusting, yet telling of the fact that the Persians will do everything to defend their land even if they don't like its leadership.
It's very difficult to convince people you're bombing left that you're helping them get rid of a regime (which, you never know for sure how popular or unpopular it is).
Iranians, yet again, are rallying around the flag for what is effectively a foreign aggression.
Edit: apparently 80000 employee workstations got remotely wiped. So not so I guess I wouldn’t call that minor.
Also that’s what I get for commenting before reading the story, they mention the Styker incident in the story lol
What, like J.Edgar?
In all likelihood his upbringing is what made him this way.
Collapse of the regime in Iran seems unlikely at the moment because it’s hard and zealous dictatorship with unlimited power and will for violence within the country. In the US OTOH the elections are coming. An administration that started a stupid and absolutely preventable war and then effectively lost faces quite a challenge there despite everything else. This seems like a perfect moment for Iran to create a deterrent for US: attacking us ends your presidency.
Not a source I would trust unless there is no other option to get the dumps or leaks.
Real link from Handala (dead): https://handala-team.to/kash-patel-current-director-of-the-f...
Archive: https://archive.ph/ILFFH
Download: https://link.storjshare.io/raw/jxoxwyp7qosgdwldereecudqpbva/...
Password: handala
I am sure the FBI will do that for my family too right?
Or we’re more than family photos hacked?
But it feels million years away.
It's interesting to wonder how you get out of a spiral of incompetence and border-line (to be polite) corrumption at the highest level.
Putting those people in charge was quick ; sure, a future administration could put them out quickly enough ; but how long will there be decently skilled people willing to take those positions ? How long until the only ones who want to put their toes in the swamp are those who really enjoy the mud ?
Put differently: can a liberal democracy organize a "just" version of a purge ?
Hard to imagine what would constitute "full blown corruption" based on this standard?
This is how all of them started.
But once you have a liberal democracy, people will refuse another purge. For very good reasons.
you get out when the thing dies because these kinds of organizations always end the same way; competence is usurped by sycophancy and flattery until there's no one left to keep it functioning and it collapses under the weight of it's own bullshit.
hopefully, there will be something to salvage but the longer these folks are in charge the bigger the splash will be when they finally bottom out
This guy, while incompetent, had his personal email hacked.
Important distinction.
On the other hand, Patel's emails "appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence". We already know that people in government - this isn't a partisan point: folks of all factions do it - use private communication channels to discuss "official business" specifically to avoid mandated disclosure and archival requirements. If (and I emphasize "if", because we don't yet know if this was the case), if Patel was doing that, and especially if he was sharing / discussing classified material, then the facts of the case would bump right up against what Clinton and Powell did.
Trying to distinguish between the two acts is like splitting hairs on the same arse.
Just makes you look silly.
HRC's secret email server and the leaked Kash Patel emails couldn't be more different.
The first one is, in the words of a federal District of Columbia judge: "one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency". [1]
The second one is the malicious leaking of some private emails. These emails are frankly none of our business (unless you are part of Kash Patel's family or friends).
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/07/politics/clinton-emails-l...
There is a difference for sure between hosting your own email server and using it for official government communications and having your own personal email address used for personal communications.
The issue that seemed to completely disappear related to the use of Signal messenger for official white house communications seems more aligned to the email server issue. It was reported heavily at the time what the reporting requirements were and that they would have to submit the full chat histories within 30 days or something like that to stay within the law. I never heard whether that actually happened or not, the story just died.
It's being down voted because it's attacking a strawman. No one is saying they are the same exact thing. It's that you will see people activatley defending this as a big nothingburger when in truth, it's still a security breach that has the potential to lower our defenses.
That's not what the "but, her emails..." reference implies. It's not saying they are the same thing. It's saying that the amount of attention and excitement made about her emails was a show. And you know it was a show, a mockery, because with cases like this where something equally bad happens and nothing will come from it. Same thing with the signalgate from last year, or all the previous times the Trump administration used private emails or private communication for government business as well.
So, no. The fact that it is not the same is immaterial. Which makes the rest of your comment immaterial.
How is this case equally bad? It's just his private email being hacked, he did nothing wrong.
There are probably about a thousand things you could point to in the Trump administration that are worse than Clinton's private email server, but this isn't one of them.
But it is literally no different than what the Trump administration did [0] after all of their finger pointing. Idiocracy runs deep across both political camps.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/18/federal-officials-n...
take your inability to draw a clear-as-day conclusion and state it plainly and multiply it by another ~50M "centrists" who continue to believe that staying "not political" and "avoiding the news" is a viable strategy to just wait the problem out.
until the checked out cowards realize that strategy isn't going to work, things will continue to get worse.
"no politics" might as as well be the second maga slogan.
Both sides are culpable here. In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen (Republicans in 2020, Democrats with the since-debunked 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal). Other countries had different issues, but the shape of the problem was basically the same everywhere.
If you keep being called bad words for years for no reason, seeing your side do the exact same thing, no surprise you tune out.
This is not even remotely true.
One party broadly mobilized a country wide effort to overthrow an election and usurp the incoming duly elected government, culminating in a violent attack on congress itself.
The other party had concerns about foreign interference in our elections.
> Simultaneously, the Republican-led Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the Russians' activities. The Senate committee's report, released in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020, found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump
I'm also curious how you think Cambridge Analytica was debunked. I don't see any mention of debunking on their wikipedia page, but I do see facebook being fined billions for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
A) Used for Official business as secretary of state
B) Full of national security strategically important decisions.
C) Improperly secured.
FBI directors personal email feels less cutting in that context.
Breaching my personal email (or my own mail server, I host one) will tell you literally nothing about my employer except perhaps the conversation from when I joined and my own employment contract.
Absolutely, it happened before on January 30, 1933
He doesn't strike me as the kinda person even using a local password manager; like keepass.
Somebody needs to find this out.
I doubt it was gmail support... surely it could not be via his phone sim, and if he didn't have two factor on; That would be so funny.
I'm tempted to check out the dark web or the telegram, but i'd rather not do either of those things.
(which might not be that unusual, he’s old enough to have opened a gmail account upon launch, before extra info hoops were put in place, and maybe he never touched his account config in the past 2 decades?
Not to mention ; you would assume he should have more than one device linked to the account and then that adds another layer, since Google will ask you " is this you trying to logon ". <-- that is the only way to get Google to do the unrecognized flow you mention.
If you are suggesting it was exposed and he didn't immediately randomise all his passwords.. WORDS FAIL ME
It's all security 101 the irony is immense...
if the US government / FBI need someone to give some talks on how to do security ...
That's really it. Not moral superiority, not technical ingenuity, not the indomitable American spirit. Just imperialist opportunism.
The first is almost impossible to screw up, though we're really trying on the last front.
Anybody have a link? You know, for science ...
Edit: Apparently, just last week the DoJ snatched their domains: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-i...
"Search harder" is a pretty unfriendly response to a request for a link...
https://landing.google.com/intl/en_in/advancedprotection/
The fact the Director of the FBI did not avail himself of this just reiterates how incompetent he is, in addition to being corrupt as heck.
maybe google doesn't advertise about this much?
This is just a sad story of a partisan hack who failed upwards into one of the most sensitive and powerful offices in the nation, simply for being a loyal sycophant, not merit.
well even I haven't seen/heard about this...
maybe google should advertise more?
(or... maybe I don't look important to google :( ?)
It's almost as if the nation were being weakened on purpose.
Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...
> Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran
So, is prophecy OK in a pitch deck? Asking for a friend.
• They are already "trained" (in random violence against civilians. Checks one box)
• Bonespur "victims" have already been weeded out.
• They are already government employees and must go where assigned. (saves TONS of paperwork)
• They already have weapons, and unspent budget money.
• They already have swell masks to protect from radioactive dust that bombing reactors creates, and (this is big)
• Their kill to loss ratio is infinite.
• It's them or Barron.Kudos to CNN for publishing a balanced take on it.
So I wouldn’t expect someone who uses Signal to automatically be the kind of person to use personal email for work.
As is the case in any administration; let alone with an admin as vindictive as Trump's.
This "balanced take" warrants kudos?
We're not even pretending to lift the bar off the ground when it comes to mainstream media, are we?
https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...
What an absolute clown
But far more seriously, imagine the danger he has put this country into by firing so many critical people, some specifically and uniquely for Iran and Middle-East defense
Let's hope we don't get another 9/11 in the next 1000 days because they are completely unprepared and won't ever see it coming, maybe even on purpose
Why would anyone bother to attack us now? This entire administration has done more to make The US weak and vulnerable than any outside attacker could have hoped to accomplish. They can just sit back and watch rome burn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
Archive: https://archive.ph/ILFFH
Download: https://link.storjshare.io/raw/jxoxwyp7qosgdwldereecudqpbva/...
Password: handala
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy#/media/File:Jo...
Seriously though I'm not so sanguine about local forces. Assuming the local PD is well trained seems like a big if, to say nothing of the risk of localized pressure or corruption. Eg would the local sheriff of a county with a very large employer be able to effectively investigate and bring charges against it? Being able to bring in federal LE brings a certain impartiality to those sorts of cases.
Because Google is too big to fail, all Gmail traffic is essentially whitelisted and they can't be bothered to do anything about it.
“Fools” is not only not an insult to clowns and jesters, but it’s far more accurate.
I would even say without any necessary religious perspective, these people are like the origins of the term and concept of “demons”, entities representing the most heinous and nefarious instincts and impulses of humanity so vile and repulsive that they had to be emanations of hell. How would you even makes sense of such evil behavior back then. They didn’t know what the dark triad of personality flaws was, narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism (yes, I understand it’s an erroneous label, but it’s the one used).
It couldn't happen to a more corrupt person and organization!
The Handala group has promised even more.
Get it while it's hot!
Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".
Lest us not forget bObama@yahoo.com or the IT guy who worked for the Clinton foundation who posted about bleachbit on recdit
Trump using yourefired as his Twitter password well into his 2016 campaign was amazing, too.
He doesn't have a face for Fox News, so he'll have to try to parlay his past closeness with the administration for lobbyist money, but if he gets shunned by the people left in the administration, he's got to go back to his public defender job.
Eh, with how many people in the current administration seem to use out of band channels to communicate very important things who knows what else they located.
How many former officials used personal accounts about government business?
How many corporate executives communicate business via personal accounts to avoid legal discovery?
How many individuals communicate outside their main email accounts to avoid scrutiny or attribution?
Point is, nobody should feel superior or shocked that such things like this happen. I understand some enjoy the privacy of their perceived enemies being exposed, but IMHO, nobody should be happy about invasion of anyone's privacy.
Noem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearing
Kennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicine
Now Patel's unhackable FBI.
I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm shift happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get irrelevant.
Under MAGA, the state no longer pretends to be guided internally by reason and progress, but is instead founded on non progress and terror, a scorched earth approach to slashing government agencies, and the accelerated destruction of state institutions: rather than seeking to resolve societal crises, MAGA produces constant crises to feed off of, preferring to annihilate its own systems rather than stop the destruction.
Yes, the world has changed. We have entered a reality where insanity has become the goal of the authoritarians, ie the self-destruction itself is the actual end goal.
We'd love to see all of those Epstein files.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-asked-russia-to-...
> "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," Trump said in a July 27, 2016 news conference.
Perhaps a little embarrassing related to communications security but come on, of all the people's email to grab they had to grab one of the most boring individuals? Ice hokey, cigars, classic cars...? Is that taboo in Iran? It is not taboo in the USA.
Be careful Iran. The country you are targeting know how to use AI and can make ultra realistic videos and images of your leaders doing unspeakable things and upload them to decentralized platforms. Such things can not be erased from the internet.
This hack of his emails is hilarious, though. And it made my day.
If Patel didn't do such thing here, the breach should only expose personal stuff, if he did, then it's much more of a problem, but either way this is a really clear example of why concern was raised back at the time.
If Gmail isn’t secure, he should be using something else.
Kind of defeats the purpose of it being a personal email don't you think?
If I had downloaded those emails, which I haven't because I know of no website that archives the internet, and if I had read them, which I haven't because that would be a breach of someone's privacy, then certainly I would have figured out that it contains no spicy state secrets. But why spend one hour assessing an information when you can get clicks by suggesting something bigger?
Those supposedly Iranian hackers surely know how to hack the western media to get attention.
I found it actually more informative to read on the sad history of the Dena, the ship whose victims this leak was dedicated to, so it's not been a complete waste of time.