#hagerbook

[Ab]

Twitter lighting up today from media insiders at Hager's book launch but nobody's fucking saying what's actually IN it.

[Ab]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/poli...wden-documents

Among the revelations in the book, Hager said, are that during the 2011 election campaign Slater obtained a database of Labour Party members, emails and donations to attack Labour with.

BREATHTAKING.

[[Malks] Pixie]

From what I can see it's a dump of communications between National, Cameron Slater and some others.

Pixie

[Ab]

You've seen the book?

[CCS]

Originally Posted by Ab

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/poli...wden-documents

BREATHTAKING.

lolwhut? This isn't new. Slater blogged at the time about how Labour had left this shit wide open on their web page.

[Ab]

NZH has posted some more tidbits:

Mr Hager said the Prime Minister's office had been "collaborating" with National Party "proxies" who were carrying out attacks on behalf of Mr Key while working to preserve his image.

"Part of the book is about how John Key has cultivated a very respectable image of being friendly and relaxed but at the same time there has been another part of his politics which New Zealanders have not seen or understood."

Mr Hager described Mr Slater as an "obnoxious" blogger whose attacks on a young man killed in a car crash earlier this year had led to hackers attacking the Whaleoil website.

He said the attack knocked out the Whaleoil site for a number of days during which time a hacker had come away with "thousands and thousands" of documents.

He said the papers revealed an "an astonishingly cynical and ugly view" of the way National's "proxies" behaved in politics.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=11308353
[/quote]

[[Malks] Pixie]

Originally Posted by Ab

You've seen the book?

No - hence the "from what I can see". Had a friend down there so will probably get to have a look through it tomorrow (mostly the index I'm guessing).

Pixie

[fixed_truth]

Hmmm, maybe it's not all just hot air

I will blog on it at length later, but after a speed read the big reveals are:

1. The Prime Minister’s office hacked into Labour’s servers, obtaining information about its donors and membership, passed the information onto Cameron Slater and then lied about it.

2. The Prime Minister’s office told Slater to OIA classified SIS documents, then had the SIS declassify them and released to Slater.

If substantiated – and Hager’s book is based on correspondence between Cameron Slater and one of Key’s senior staffers – then the scale of the abuse of power is unprecedented, and there will need to be a transparent independent investigation into the Prime Minister’s office.

http://dimpost.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/dirty-politics/

[Ab]

If #1 is the Drupal clusterfuck that we all laughed at back in June 2011, I can't see - without having read anything in the book of course - how that counts as anyone hacking the site. It was wide open to the Internet and all that shit was visible to anyone who cared to look.

Unless of course some National uberhaxx0r broke in, saw what was there, set all the directories to open and indexable, and then told Slater?

Or maybe Hager is using a nontechnical person's definition of "hacked", i.e. "looked".

#2 on the other hand, well that's a whole new bag of worms. If that's true it's fucking nuclear, goodbye election stuff.

[chubby]

Originally Posted by Ab

If that's true it's fucking nuclear, goodbye election stuff.

doubt it.
plenty of retards (as well you know) who are good at self-deception.

[Pimp-X]

Hager is a nutcase.

[StN]

"Mangrove" - LOL! Judith, you crack me up. Poor old plughead.

[Rince]

Originally Posted by Pimp-X

Hager is a nutcase.

I've met him (socially, my FIL is a long term friend) and he does come across as a bit of a conspiracy nut.... even when he is not being Nicky Hager, author of Corngate, Hollow Men et al, he does give the impression of wearing a tin foil hat.

[Ab]

Danyl M has posted a more detailed summary this morning:

http://dimpost.wordpress.com/2014/08...itics-summary/

After reading that my reaction was basically "that's it?"

I see today that the rhetoric has cooled from "The PM's office broke into Labour's computers and stole stuff!!!1" to "In 2011, Slater was alerted to a hole in the Labour Party website which allowed him to access huge amounts of personal information about members" (nzh).

[Lightspeed]

No one who supports National's bullying behaviour is going to find anything shocking in that. In fact I imagine some will applaud what's been detailed.

I think some fence sitters are going to struggle to swallow the relationship between Slater and Collins.

[Ab]

From what I've read of readings of the book, the "PM staffer wrote an OIA request of classified material for Slater and then made sure the things that the OIA request listed were declassified in order to be given to Slater" bit is the most dodgy. All the other "downloaded Labour donor list", "gets paid to write puff pieces for private industry", "has personal contact with politicians right up to Ministers" stuff is just meh. Slater is an ambitious, hardworking, vindictive private citizen with an array of publicly-acknowledged mental health issues who runs a blog. Some of the things he posts on his blog make me want to stab myself in the face. Big fucking deal.

[Biggus]

Interesting, 2 minutes spent in the car listening to part of an interview with Mike Hosking today then he was asked why he thinks he is justified in publishing his "obtained information" which he's not prepared to show/prove he has, but when asked why he thought Whaleoil shouldnt be doing the same.... ummmmmmmmmmmm, sorry I dont have an answer.,..

[Ab]

As numerous people far more infosec savvy than me have commented (pipes? chip in buddy) the whaleoil.co.nz DDOS, the whaleoil.co.nz site cloning, and the copied correspondence seem to be different things.

I can't see how some of the things that are reported to be in Hager's book could possibly have been obtained through a website hack. Emails, facebook messages. I'm guessing (or have seen it suggested by more cleverer people) that the DDOS was just a smokescreen or diversion for a concerted hack campaign on Slater's life. It looks like Slater got owned from top to bottom, and whoever did it fed what he got to Hager for the book.

[atpipes]

The problem here is there's not much to chip in about. There's a big pieces of the puzzle missing.

In the book, Hager says he got a USB key delivered with a bunch of stuff on it. Chats, Emails etc. He also says there's a correlation with the DDoS attack that occurred against the site after "that" post. He doesn't provide any additional detail (nor have I seen any other comments) about what that correlation is. Fact of the matter is it's hard to guess what the correlation may be if any other than a smoke screen for other activity. I haven't seen or heard any details of what sort of DDoS occurred (fat bandwidth or application exhaustion) but that may provide some possible insight.

If the site was popped, I doubt there would be access to Facebook chats or E-Mails (with exception to E-mail possibly residing on the same shared host. but who does that now days?).

There would be however, access to credentials for the WO site itself. If these were in the clear or cracked then there is a possibility of password reuse occurring to access other services.

There is also the possibility malware was planted and then used to pop WO's desktop and then data was ex-filtrated that way.

Either way, someone went out of their way to grab the data and that will be the focus of any police investigation. From a forensics PoV I'd assume they look for two kinds of evidence, access logs (website, E-Mail etc) and any transport logs. The later is likely non-existent and given how long it's been (almost 6 months) since the DDoS and then further hacks, it would not be surprising to see the logs no longer exist. Until something hits court, we most probably will never know.

With regards to the Labour site hack, this is old news that it occurred. IIRC there was something like /backups/ with directory indexing enabled and they dumped the SQL files (someone who knows help me out here, I didn't follow this case).

The point raised in the book about this is not so much that people accessed the data but the fact that log analysis showed that the Nats did so and then denied it.

The bit in the book goes into specifics (IP address access times etc.) as well as collaborating E-Mails between Slater and others about the access. I assume someone else involved has handed over the access_logs as well as part of all of this.

[atpipes]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/poli...ver-email-leak

Has some updates:

"Slater said he became aware of the hack when he noticed something was "not right" with his email.

"I changed the password and went on a mad dash to change all other passwords."

""I suspect they entered Gmail through brute force attack - Kim might like to boast how it was done. It doesn't matter. After about 15 minutes I shut them out. Of about 80G of information, they were disconnected after getting only 8G of it.""


... This all looks like password reuse to me.

[Ab]

whaleoil.co.nz MX is pointing at Google Apps, so I presume that's what Slater means by "Gmail". A bruteforce attempt on Google Apps sets off alarm bells all over the place and locks the account down, so I doubt that happened.

[atpipes]

Or he moved after the attack.

[fobski]

WO moved behind cloudflare after the DDOS,

anyone got any historical DNS records tool in case it was moved? If the dude was using Google apps and not using 2fa... then yeah

as for the labour donations site hack... misconfigured software

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post...te-compromised

As I said cheekily last night... Id fucking lol if slater was using Yahoo/Xtra mail when he got comprimised

As for his facebook messages etc... anyone aware of any tool that syncs Facebook messages to an email store? If not then a box of his somewhere got popped, and all those yeards of messages stored in FB messenger chat got sucked down.

anyway... old mate @failymonster is involved somewhere... if not in multiple areas

[Ab]

WO is running Wordpress; wouldn't be surprised if Slater had some Facebook-connection plugin installed for comments/user accounts. If the site got "popped" then I could imagine the intruder snopping FB credentials that way.

[Know me.]

Originally Posted by atpipes

[url]


... This all looks like password reuse to me.

[fixed_truth]

Originally Posted by Ab

From what I've read of readings of the book, the "PM staffer wrote an OIA request of classified material for Slater and then made sure the things that the OIA request listed were declassified in order to be given to Slater" bit is the most dodgy.

What about Collins abusing her power as a Minister? Seems worse than what Maurice got forced to stand down for.

Also dotcom must be keeping the email where Key talks about him until sep15th lol

[Ab]

Originally Posted by fixed_truth

What about Collins abusing her power as a Minister? Seems worse than what Maurice got forced to stand down for.

Also dotcom must be keeping the email where Key talks about him until sep15th lol

Well all it would take is an diligently-crafted OIA request to find out. Right now there's no proof whatsoever of it actually happening.

[xor]

Some guy at work said there is an email trail. Any proof on that?

[Ab]

I just don't know how you'd ever prove something like that. Check it out, here's an email I just received via an anonymous informant:

Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: by 10.52.3.194 with SMTP id e2csp64333vde;
Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:48:42 -0700 (PDT)
X-Received: by 10.140.49.201 with SMTP id q67mr20610619qga.7.1408056522031;
Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:48:42 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Received: from BLU004-OMC4S6.hotmail.com (blu004-omc4s6.hotmail.com. [65.55.111.145])
by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id j49si9352511qga.126.2014.08.14.15.48.41
for <[email protected]>
(version=TLSv1.2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA bits=128/128);
Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:48:41 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of hotmail.com designates 65.55.111.145 as permitted sender) client-ip=65.55.111.145;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
spf=pass (google.com: domain of hotmail.com designates 65.55.111.145 as permitted sender) [email protected]
Received: from BLU403-EAS124 ([65.55.111.136]) by BLU004-OMC4S6.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(7.5.7601.22712);
Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:48:41 -0700
X-TMN: [zEXcjxYjr8eHEUOQiexwkAwwqXhoPOsT]
X-Originating-Email: [[email protected]]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Return-Path: [email protected]
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="Apple-Mail-B3850B32-226F-4B19-B19D-9A3C78081E97"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: xor <[email protected]>
MIME-Version: 1.0 (1.0)
Subject: THIS IS REELY TRUE AND LEGIT
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 08:18:36 +0930
To: Ab <[email protected]>
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 14 Aug 2014 22:48:41.0037 (UTC) FILETIME=[E4D84FD0:01CFB811]

COCK = GOOD

Headers and everything, all those domains and IPs resolve, yep must be legit. I can only conclude that xor loves the cock. Look, there's an email trail. Proof.

The only way I can think of verifying this is if xor were a government employee using a government computer, and someone were to file an OIA request for all emails sent by xor on Aug 15 addressed to [email protected].

I presume Hager has NOT done this - well, the Collins/Slater equivalent - because if he had, we'd know about it. And there are allegedly (haven't read it) other things in the book that are just laughably implausible.

[adonis]

An article by just another well known liberal-commie-pinko on Nicky Hagar's new book -

"The vilification of Hager by Key and Steven Joyce, National's election campaign supremo and the one designated to front for National when there is trouble, is a charade.

Their dilemma is that they have to rubbish the book as being wrong on every score when they know much if not all of it, is accurate"

The journalist? JOHN. ARMSTRONG.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=11309684

[chubby]

nice quote from simon lusk in the comments...

"There are a few basic propositions with negative campaigning that are worth knowing about. It lowers turnout, favours right more than left as the right continues to turn out, and drives away the independents. In short, many people stop participating in politics. If politicians cannot be trusted, if politics looks like a petty or ugly game, and if no one seems to be talking about the things that matter, then what's the point of bothering to participate? Just leave them to it. There are innovations in US Republican Party thinking on this point; election tactics do not have to be just about winning votes; they can be equally effective if groups of people in society just stop voting altogether. We should not assume that everyone thinks low voter turnout is a bad idea."

[Ab]

National's greatest advantage here is that Hager can't prove any of it. The excerpts I've seen so far read more like a blog than a work of journalism.

[Ab]

"Author Nicky Hager said his source won't let him release the documents behind his book which accuses National ministers and staff of feeding information to right wing bloggers."

http://rnz.to/1t5yKiy

[crocos]

Because that's not damaging to his credibility at all.

[Spink]

Originally Posted by crocos

Because that's not damaging to his credibility at all.

Why would someone who wants to make a quick buck care about credibility?

[MadMax]

Nerdgate

[chubby]

Originally Posted by Ab

National's greatest advantage here is that Hager can't prove any of it. The excerpts I've seen so far read more like a blog than a work of journalism.

excerpts usually read like a blog.a lot of serious journalistic work reads that way.the need for relevance pushes it out faster than allows for a nice narrative structure.

[Ab]

Granted. Unfair to rant until I've read the full text.

[Ab]

Dirty politics yall

http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/arti...ectid=11310180

[pxpx]

There's bunch of texts that Slater has received from Wayne Tempero which are allegedly from KDC.. funny stuff!