Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/01/white-house-cybersecurity-advi.html
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I dunno, locking himself out of his own phone probably did make things more secure.
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Except for those who are inhuman.
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I take comfort that as horrible as this administrator is, they are mostly inept.
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“1-2-3-4-5? That’s amazing, I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!”
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Why not take it to the Genius Bar? He’s not a government official, has no security clearance, and no formal reason to have any classified material on his phone. So, other than looking like a n00b, why would he take it to White House security experts instead of Apple? He’s not employed by the government, and they should not be spending any resources helping him.
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Because he was a part of the administration at that time. Giuliani is a multiple threat, he’s incompetent at many positions.
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He was an informal adviser, not a part of the administration. The President can name someone anything they want, but that doesn’t make them a part of the White House staff or cabinet. He never had a security clearance or was paid a salary from the government.
ETA: (from the article)
Giuliani was named Trump’s cybersecurity adviser on Jan. 12, 2017, an informal position outside of the government.
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Hey, Rudy. Here’s your password:
“Theownerofthisiphioneisanidiot”
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I think we found the “deep state” trump keeps complaining about !!!
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This is hardly a surprise. Giuliani clearly doesn’t understand computers, nor even how to work one. Remember that time he was mystified that, after he dropped some spaces and put a couple words together that formed a url on Twitter, it turned into a link? He thought he somehow had been hacked, after someone then registered that url to mock him? Totally clueless.
At best, he was making money as a middleman, using his connections to act as a front for people who knew what they were doing. But far more likely, given what ol’ Ghouls has been up to subsequently, is that he had one or more clients who were paying him to influence government policy, which he did by providing “security” advice to this administration. (Which most likely resulted in things being less secure.)
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This administration creates so many new attack surfaces that were never available with past administrations. Now all the ideas dismissed because they hinged on someone in the White House being an idiot suddenly are all in play.
I would not be surprised to learn that Putin and pals have hacked phones to listen in on the oval office. trump has insistantly used an insecure second phone, Rudy aparently hands his phone over to anyone, and there is no reason to think Jr. or Kushner are any smarter.
their ineptness provides me no comfort
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Not that that little detail has stopped anyone else informally working in this administration from getting access to classified information.
I feel mixed. They could be doing a lot more damage if they weren’t so inept. On the other hand, their ineptness itself is doing damage, separately. I’m not sure which is worse, though.
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Or formally, when they would be objectively prohibited from gaining security clearance *cough, Jared, cough.
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Though in Jared’s case he eventually went “legit” when they were forced to give him security clearance…
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“Old Man Yells at Restores From Cloud”
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It’s totally cool for the average Joe without tech skills to go to the Genius Bar for whatever problem they’re having. The point is that this guy has put up a shingle as a cyber security expert and, in practice, is more inept than the average Joe.
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lol. what about the time he showed text messages on national tv outing the name of whom he’d been in communication with?
good point. it also acts as a smoke screen for a lot of other damage and damaging characters.
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