Mat and Haskell, DNC question

[CJ3a]

How does the DNC firewall drop out between the canidates and how does a user know its down during the course a normal work day. Is all the data combined and filtered according to user?

[Haskell_Hunter]

IMHO, the media got it completely wrong like the do with most everything else.

 

A firewall is either a piece of software of hardware that allows or blocks network traffic from one network to another.  Windows PCs and Macs have built-in software firewalls that prevent malicious attackers from gaining access to your PC (although they do it poorly).  Your Linksys or Netgear home router to the Internet also has a firewall to protect the computers in your home from someone on the Internet from gaining access.

 

I seriously doubt that one or more people from Bernie's team had the technical knowledge required to bypass a firewall.  That's not an easy thing to do.

 

However, more than likely all of this data is stored on the same server for everyone to access.  The only thing that prevents one party from seeing the other party's data are the user profiles that are created.  For example, when you log into Facebook or even this site, you have certain privileges and access based on your user profile.  You can see and control your own stuff, but you cannot necessarily do that with other people's data.  What probably happened is that they hired some sh!tty programmers (Matt) and their code and configurations were so poorly designed that it allowed one party to see the other party's data.  Someone may have found a way of tricking the software, which is not too difficult to do when you've written some craptacular code.

 

I can absolutely see someone intentionally tricking the software to gain access to other data, that happens all the time (remember, this is the same group of morons who gave us ObamaCare, so I have zero faith in their ability to create any website).

 

That's my guess, but I don't have access to their systems (yet), so I don't know for sure.

[CJ3a]

Thanks Haskell. The press is saying the server is run by an outside contractor. i would like to know who's familly member of the DNC party owns it.

[BowhunterNJ]

I'd agree with most of what HH said, except it probably wasn't a sh!tty programmer lol

If anything it was probably a sh!tty server admin!

 

I definitely agree what they call a "firewall" is probably nothing even remotely close to the true definition of a firewall.  At best it's an ACL (access control list) which is what allows users/groups to see certain documents on servers, while locking others out.

Given Bernie and Hillary's groups are in the same party, it's not far fetched to believe they had similar ACL setups to resources and someone could have accidentally put the voter data out on a "shared" resource/drive where the "entire group" could see it.

I've seen this happen before in my industry, so even that isn't the server admin's fault, that's user error.

At this point they are granting Bernie's team access to the voter data, so I guess it doesn't matter.

 

I'd love to read the technical details to how this was a "firewall" issue...I can't even think of a reasonable use case in how that could be.

And like HH said, hacking a firewall is a difficult task...nevermind for a politician's team members (unless Bernie is offering free donuts for hacking time)

 

That's my .02

[_X7]

I think it is more of matter of the Democratic party wanting to draw more attention to themselves. Pot calling the kettle black as far as the rest of it. We know how honest Hillary is......

[Bucksnbows]