Snowden Used Cheap Software to Collect NSA Documents

Security, LOL

Intelligence officials investigating how Edward Snowden gained access to roughly 1.7 million of the country's most highly classified documents say they have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to "scrape" the National Security Agency's networks, and he kept at it even after he was briefly challenged by agency officials.

Using "Web crawler" software designed to search, index and back up a website, Snowden "scraped data out of our systems" while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. "We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence," the official said. The process, he added, was "quite automated."

The findings are striking because the NSA's mission includes protecting the nation's most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from cyberattacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from Russia and China. Snowden's "insider attack," by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators found.

Comments

[SweatingGin]

I'm suspecting actually *free* software. Probably curl or wget.

And OMG one of those two comes with every Mac or Linux OS!

Article is terribly written.

[playa manhattan]

The link for the New York Times goes to http://www.dispatch.com.

[Fist of Etiquette]

HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT.

[iEagleHammer]

Yup, a high school dropout is smarter than the entire federal government. Shows why they shouldn't have power over us.

[Lyle]

Federal government is learning to not trust anyone, not even their own employees. Although, he was some kind of contract worker for them.

Snowden was successful because his colleagues trusted him.

[SweatingGin]

Interestingly enough, when you look at WikiLeaks, that's the whole point behind it. Assange wasn't trying to get all this information out there -- he was trying to make the organizations so afraid of leaks that they were unable to function internally.

Make sure that no one can be trusted with the information, and that the workers in the org can't trust each other, and then the org can collapse under it's own bureaucratic weight.