Less than 24 hours after announcing they were dropping the debut of the forthcoming move, The Interview, Senator John McCain has found a way to blame the Obama administration to the Sony hack that lead to the decision:
“Recently reported intelligence findings that North Korea directed cyber-attacks at Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Pictures’ decision to cancel the release of an upcoming movie in reaction to those cyber-attacks, are profoundly troubling.
“By effectively yielding to aggressive acts of cyber-terrorism by North Korea, that decision sets a troubling precedent that will only empower and embolden bad actors to use cyber as an offensive weapon even more aggressively in the future.
“But, make no mistake. The need for Sony Pictures to make that decision ultimately arose from the Administration's continuing failure to satisfactorily address the use of cyber weapons by our nation's enemies.
“Indeed, North Korea's cyber-attack on Sony Pictures is only the latest in a long and troubling list of attempts by malign actors to use cyber to undermine our economic and national security interests. From Iranian and Russian attacks on American banks to China's orchestrated campaign to steal military secrets from our defense contractors, the Administration's failure to deter our adversaries has emboldened, and will continue to embolden, those seeking to harm the United States through cyberspace.
“This must change. If elected Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I will enhance congressional oversight of related programs, operations and activities by establishing a subcommittee focused on cyber matters such as this and hold the Administration accountable for its failure to institute a meaningful strategy for combating these increasingly brazen and dangerous actions.
“But, Congress as a whole must also address these issues and finally pass long-overdue comprehensive cybersecurity legislation. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the coming year to make this matter a priority.”
Wow, I feel safer knowing that a 78 year old will make sure we are up on cyber security, don't you?
Let's stop and think about this for a moment. One of the most common vectors hackers use to compromise a system is by exploiting security flaws, usually present in outdated software. That is something I want you to keep in mind for a moment, as we check something out.
John McCain has a website, which runs on the very popular Wordpress platform. Now using tools all of us have right in our browser, namely right clicking on the page and selecting "view source", we can see that this is indeed the software he is running:
See that line that says "generator"? That is telling us what software and version his site is powered by. He is using Wordpress 4.0. Great, except for one thing. Wordpress 4.0.1 was released on November 20th, addressing some rather serious security concerns.
Perhaps if John McCain wants to dive into the tech world, and preach cyber security, he should first make sure his own house is in order. We're going on a month now that the Senator from Arizona has been running his own site on software with a known security flaw, and without updating to the fixed version. True, like all Republicans, John McCain does seem to come from the camp of "practice what I preach, not what I do".
