FYI: The White House employee who ensures Trump doesn’t get
hacked has been fired
"Donald Trump's administration has fired the White House's chief
information security officer, who was responsible for ensuring the
president and his closest staff were safe from cyber-attacks.
Cory Louie, who was appointed under President Obama, was
reportedly forced to resign and escorted from the building late
last week.
His dismissal came shortly after it emerged that Mr Trump was
still using an unsecured and outdated Android phone to tweet -
which could make him particularly vulnerable to hackers.
The circumstances surrounding Mr Louie's departure remain unclear,
but ZDNet reported that he was “escorted out from his office in
the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from
the West Wing".
He was accused of "poor management", amid what was described as a
“toxic” working environment, the technology news site said.
Mr Louie's LinkedIn profile remains unchanged at the time of
writing, and reports of his dismissal are yet to be publicly
confirmed by the White House.
Remaining staff have “targets on their back” and are afraid of
speaking out, calling the actions a “witch hunt” for former Obama
appointees, a source who wished to remain nameless told ZDNet.
After holding various security positions at Dropbox and Google, Mr
Louie joined the White House as part of former President Obama's
cyber-security national action plan, which created a federal chief
information security officer (CISO) position to oversee the
government's internal cyber-security strategy..."
https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/02/09/2247240/republicans-are-reportedly-using-a-self-destructing-message-app-to-avoid-leaks Trump administration members and other Republicans are using the encrypted, self-destructing messaging app Confide to keep conversations private in the wake of hacks and leaks, according to Jonathan Swan and David McCabe at Axios. Axios writes that "numerous senior GOP operatives and several members of the Trump administration" have downloaded Confide, which automatically wipes messages after they're read. One operative told Axios that the app "provides some cover" for people in the party. He ties it to last year's hack of the Democratic National Committee, which led to huge and damaging information dumps of DNC emails leading up to the 2016 election. But besides outright hacks, the source also said he liked the fact that Confide makes it difficult to screenshot messages, because only a few words are shown at a time. That suggests that it's useful not just for reducing paper trails, but for stopping insiders from preserving individual messages -- especially given the steady flow of leaks that have come out since Trump took office. As Axios notes, official White House business is subject to preservation rules, although we don't know much about who's allegedly using Confide and what they're doing with it, so it's not clear whether this might run afoul of those laws. It's also difficult to say how much this is a specifically Republican phenomenon, and how much is a general move toward encryption. https://politics.slashdot.org/story/17/02/09/1446219/nsa-contractor-indicted-over-mammoth-theft-of-classified-data A former National Security Agency contractor was indicted on Wednesday by a federal grand jury on charges he willfully retained national defense information, in what U.S. officials have said may have been the largest heist of classified government information in history. The indictment alleges that Harold Thomas Martin, 52, spent up to 20 years stealing highly sensitive government material from the U.S. intelligence community related to national defense, collecting a trove of secrets he hoarded at his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland. The government has not said what, if anything, Martin did with the stolen data. Martin faces 20 criminal counts, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison, the Justice Department said. "For as long as two decades, Harold Martin flagrantly abused the trust placed in him by the government," said U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein.