ROFLMAO... yes, yes... you caught me! I'm only pretending to be a perfectly sane, well informed individual, but I'm really a member of the FIC, and I'm here to brainwash all of you, on behalf of my glorious reptile alien leaders! I'm going to convince all of you that the Mandalorian way is the only way, with my knowledge of secret things, that you can only find out about by reading nationally syndicated newspapers!
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and be serious... there are a lot of ways to disagree with me, but most people here just want to call me names, and that's cool. I've been called worse by better and all that.
If you want to see what's wrong with this, without reaching all the way back to the context of the filthy politics that defined 2016 (like the unmasking)...
The main argument that the Durham situation is a tempest in a teapot, can be summed up in this tweet, which Romana linked to, earlier in this thread:
I think we're all on the same page with that, right? They snooped on Trump's DNS requests, but that's ok, because DNS requests aren't 'substantive'.
That's just crazy. There is absolutely no world in which DNS results are not valuable to an attacker. Just looking at the traffic can tell you all you need to know about them for just about any attack you can imagine. You talk to anybody who has ever red teamed anything and they will tell you that you can profile an entire network just with the searches the technical people make. What hardware are they running? What firmware version? How about the OS? Did their last update go wrong? What's their favorite kind of food when they travel? What health issues do they have? What music do they like? It's absolutely insane how much you can get from that data. That's not even getting into things you might dig up on their stack overflow posts. Most technical people give away everything on stack overflow and quora.
If you think this is not substantive data, then you don't really know how a cyber attack is supposed to work, and that's ok. I know most people don't have a solid grasp on this kind of thing, and a lot of people take advantage of that situation. Maybe this will help...
I recently stumbled across a podcast that gets into how cyber attacks work, in great detail, from the perspective of an American government spook. I mean, I don't think this is actually how the government does things, but I do think that this is what the government wants us civilians to think about how they do things, which is still useful information to have. If you don't get all paranoid, run backups, change passwords, and reinstall windows, every time your computer crashes out, then you should probably listen to this. Instability is the first sign of many cyber attacks. You don't have to be crazy, but it's good to have a healthy level of paranoia.
In today's world of intelligence gathering, governments hack other governments. This episode takes you on a ride with a nation state actor to see exactly how it's done.
darknetdiaries.com