Media and Obama Responsible for HBO Hack?

There is a direct trail from the U.S. media to the hack of HBO and many others. Of course the media isn’t alone. It had an accomplice in the Obama administration that had an opportunity of a lifetime to put a stop to or at least slow down international hacking into the U.S.

In August of last year, we reported the Obama administration was preparing to elevate the stature of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, signaling more emphasis on developing cyber weapons to deter attacks, punish intruders into U.S. networks and tackle adversaries such as the Islamic State.

In March of that year, Iranian hackers were indicted by Attorney General Loretta Lynch for hacking a dam in Rye, New York and New York-based financial institutions.

Lynch said they conspired together and with others to conduct a series of cyberattacks in all which cost the victims tens of millions of dollars. She went on to say these attacks harmed hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S.

For some strange reason which no one seems to understand, the U.S. government, obviously aware of this indictment, decided to send $400 million dollars in unmarked bills to the Iranian regime. They then sent another $1.3 billion.

We also sent them over $100 billion around the same time.

In exchange, we received hostages among other items.

But, we asked, what about the hackers?

We felt like we were screaming in a vacuum. The media was obsessed with covering any other story but not what was really important, getting these hackers and prosecuting them.

These are the actual stories being written at the time:

Is it any wonder with this being the cream of the crop the media produces, that the Kardashians are literally considered royalty by their readers?

Finding these hackers was an amazing accomplishment. Tracking down malicious people online is virtually impossible to do. So the Obama administration should get great credit for this. But once identified, we left them there – even though we had a bargaining chip worth over a hundred billion dollars.

As a result, Iran has kept on hacking and the latest news is they were behind the HBO attack and many others. Devlin Barrett lays out the details in the Washington Post.

When you have such an opportunity – to bring hackers to justice, you don’t squander it. National security is a major role of the federal Government and they let us all down.

The media however shapes public opinion and polls and they didn’t report this story. They gave the government a pass. 

As a result, every hack done without fear of consequence can be attributed to our lax stance on bringing known hackers to justice and to the media’s inability to piece together  a story involving massive financial payments and apprehension of known hackers from the same country.

Disclosure: This is not intended to be a political story – it is a factual account of an obvious missed opportunity which should never happen again if we want to reduce the threat cyberattacks pose to the world.

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