WCF

History, politics, and culture articles and forum discussions.

Phidippides

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Did Trump just pull off one of the most brilliant political maneuvers in U.S. history?

On Saturday, Trump began his tweet-storm which alleged some crazy-sounding things about former President Obama.

It seemed kooky at the time. A pretty huge allegation without much of anything to back it up. But perhaps it should be viewed for the effect it had rather than for its content.

The allegations did two things.

First, it shifted the media narrative that seemed to be circling non-stop about Trump and Russia. Despite the lack of any evidence that Trump conspired with the Russians to thwart the election, the media continues to pile on this story. It seems to be an unbelievable modern version of McCarthyism in which now even speaking with the Russians by a Trump Administration member is akin to a black mark.

But the second thing Trump’s tweets did was it brought the entire issue of the wiretapping of Trump into focus. Reports on this had already been published in the media, including a January 20, 2017 story in the New York Times that had pretty much escaped the notice of the public at large. With Trump’s tweets, however, the story was given a second life and led to its discussion on the weekend talk shows. One of these included former DNI James Clapper to state publicly that there was “no such wiretap activity” on Trump.

Perhaps more importantly, he made a statement to Chuck Todd of NBC that the Trump-Russian connection lacked evidence:

Clapper was also asked on “Meet the Press” if he had any evidence that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russian government while the Kremlin was working to influence the election.

“Not to my knowledge,” Clapper said, based on the information he had before his time in the position ended.

“We did not include anything in our report … that had any reflect of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report,” he said. “We had no evidence of such collusion.”

The effect of this is that the intelligence community took a step forward to vouch for Trump in the media-driven Trump-Russia issue.  If no wiretap was authorized, then it also means that probable cause for a wiretap did not exist, which further strengthens Trump’s case that there was no collusion with Russia.  Effectively, this “killed the Russian meme”, as Don Surber put it.  It means that any behind-the-scenes investigations into Trump by the federal government probably weren’t all they were cracked up to be.  And if an illegal wiretap was issued then it opens up a whole different can of worms which also plays in Trump’s favor and against Obama.

This is all very significant.  But even apart from this, recent events have also pitted the intelligence community against mainstream media outlets, such as the New York Times, in their prior reporting that wiretapping had been done.  Based on what Clapper said, the New York Times reported some “fake news” of its own.  This takes wind out of the sails of credibility given to the paper and to any other MSM outlet that reported on wiretaps in the past.

Going forward, Trump has a bolstered case and faces off against a weakened mainstream media.  The Trump-Russia story will now be intertwined with the Obama-wiretapping issue, so the media will be forced to deal with the negative Obama fallout as it tries to shut down Trump.

Does Trump lose in this at all?  Marginally.  Assuming his tweets were exaggerations and imprecise, he comes across as a person who exaggerates and is imprecise.  However, these are already characteristics reflected in the public’s perception of him.  In other words, it’s not going to change people’s views of him much.

Trump’s weekend tweets, while at first appearing to be knee-jerk reactions that only exacerbated his problems, now appear to be borderline brilliant.  Faced with mounting problems posed by multiple powerful foes, he made a cunning move that leveled them both while leaving himself relatively unscathed.

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I got spam email from….Steve Mnuchin?

Well that didn’t take long.

Steve Mnuchin was confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury less than two weeks ago, and today I find in my inbox a classic piece of spam that play’s on Trump’s pick.  Not only did the email mention Steve Mnuchin’s name, but it claimed to be from Steve Mnuchin.  Here is the text:

Good day to you Sir / Madam

This email is to keep you informed that I Mr.Steven T. Mnuchin, nominated On February 13, 2017 the Secretary to the United States National Treasury wishes to inform you that there is an on-going reimbursement payment program, were with the help of the (OFAC) the United Nations, world bank and the United States Government is reimbursing scammed victims globally who may have one way or the other happen to lost outrageous amount of money to impostors claiming to be individuals, bank staffs nor organizations for the release of your numerous sums of fund via numerous ways which they do not have access to.

We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you, this has been agreed upon and has been signed. You are advised to contact Mr Collins Lucas who is in charge of your payment through our office as he is our representative. Contact him immediately for more information on how to get your compensation of U.S $500,000 USD payment from the VISA CARD Verification Department

Therefore We have received a mandate and instructions from the (OFAC) and authorities involved here at the U.S Treasury Department to commence the immediate release of

your reimbursement payment valued at just ($500,000) Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars only which has been endorsed for remittance to you accordingly in a

legal moral and ethical way. Which is why I have contacted and to let you know that the United States Department for Justice, in The Person of the Attorney General

will get some documents for you so that this transaction can be completed without delay.

This program is to sanitize the image of Africa that has stained by the activities of scammers and fraud stars by paying up all beneficiaries pending funds

accordingly. All payment will be via Bank transfer certified bank from our foreign treasury account. Therefore,you should furnish him with the following pieces of

information:

1.Your full names
2.Direct telephone number/Fax Number
3.Mailing address
4.Age
5.Occupation

Person to Contact: Mr Collins Lucas
Visa Card Verification Department
Email: ——@gmail.com
For further inquiries : (646)-781—–

The Department Officer Collins Lucas will provide you with instructions on how you can receive your reimbursement payment accordingly through any of your preffered channel

of delivery depending on your choice. All documentation that will be backing up your payment claim shall be obtained and a scanned copy will be sent to your email nor

fax machine as proof for verification.

Yours faithfully,

Mr.Steven T. Mnuchin
Treasury Secretary Main Treasury
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20220

While the spammer was certainly very timely, I would only give it a rating of about 3 out of 10 on the believability scale.  Plenty of errors (grammar and spelling) abound, and it just fails as a work of original scamming.  The reply-to address was from a Philippines-based Yahoo address, and the email address for the contact at the “Visa Card Verification Department” is listed as some Gmail address.  Not very convincing.

Still, the fact that a spammer would try to capitalize upon one of Trump’s cabinet picks is interesting.  It makes me think that spammers keep up with politics after all, although the email oddly refers to “The Person of the Attorney General” rather than “Jeff Sessions”, even though Sessions was confirmed a few days before Mnuchin.

I wonder if more spam inspired by political news is on the way.  Although obnoxious, it could be more entertaining that ones sent by Nigerian princes.

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Is the Yahoo data breach cause for concern?

I received the following email in my Yahoo mail account this evening.  I don’t use my Yahoo mail account at all, but the icon flashes once in a while when using other Yahoo services, so I took a look at it.  Apparently, this breach hit about, oh, one billion users (did anyone know that Yahoo had a billion users?).  Here was the notice I got:

NOTICE OF DATA BREACH

Dear ***,
We are writing to inform you about a data security issue that may involve your Yahoo account information. We have taken steps to secure your account and are working closely with law enforcement.

What Happened?

Law enforcement provided Yahoo in November 2016 with data files that a third party claimed was Yahoo user data. We analyzed this data with the assistance of outside forensic experts and found that it appears to be Yahoo user data. Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, we believe an unauthorized third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with a broader set of user accounts, including yours. We have not been able to identify the intrusion associated with this theft. We believe this incident is likely distinct from the incident we disclosed on September 22, 2016.

What Information Was Involved?

The stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. Not all of these data elements may have been present for your account. The investigation indicates that the stolen information did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. Payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system we believe was affected.

What We Are Doing

We are taking action to protect our users:

We are requiring potentially affected users to change their passwords.
We invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so that they cannot be used to access an account.
We continuously enhance our safeguards and systems that detect and prevent unauthorized access to user accounts.
What You Can Do

We encourage you to follow these security recommendations:

Change your passwords and security questions and answers for any other accounts on which you used the same or similar information used for your Yahoo account.
Review all of your accounts for suspicious activity.
Be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for your personal information or refer you to a web page asking for personal information.
Avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.
Additionally, please consider using Yahoo Account Key, a simple authentication tool that eliminates the need to use a password on Yahoo altogether.
For More Information

For more information about this issue and our security resources, please visit the Yahoo Security Issues FAQs page available at https://yahoo.com/security-update.

Protecting your information is important to us and we work continuously to strengthen our defenses.

Sincerely,

Bob Lord
Chief Information Security Officer
Yahoo

After reading this long email, my reaction was to shrug it off.  This was a breach that occurred over three years ago, and some of the information taken (“…names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth…”) isn’t what I consider to be overly private.  What could be more alarming is the theft of “encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers”.  Armed with this information, fraudsters could potentially gain access to sensitive accounts.

I typically try to avoid using the same security questions when I need to fill them out on secure sites, but this may be relatively difficult when dealing with services that require users to answer questions from a specific list (e.g. “what is your mother’s maiden name?”).

I think that a better approach for security questions may be to allow users to generate both the question and the answer.  Using this, I might generate my own question like “What is your favorite restaurant in the city of New York?”  I would then generate my own answer, and chances are it would be a question that I would not again repeat on a different site.  I think I have seen this kind of approach offered in the past, but it is by no means widespread.

Anyway, it seems like we see major breaches like what happened to Yahoo on a semi-regular basis these days, and there will probably not be an end to these going forward.

WCF