(UPDATED) PMO: Do you think it's easy to secure a mailing list?

re:

2nd hacked email about “Serbia-Kosovo = Canada-Quebec”, i.e. insult to Canadians’ intelligence…

Now compare with this from FACEBOOK as of around March 28, 2008:

Group Info Name: Serbian-Canadian Voting Alliance

Type: Organizations – Political Organizations

Description:

In light of the Government of Canada’s decision to recognise the illegal and unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo, and the Government of Canada’s refusal to consider views of 200,000 Serbian-Canadians, in addition to the large Russian, Greek, Ukrainian communities and others, this group has been created for the following purposes:

I) To help depose the current Conservative Government of Stephen Harper which has recognized Kosovo’s illegal declaration of independence

II) Further weaken the Liberal Opposition Party of Stephane Dion who is also for recognition

This will be done in the following ways:

I) By recruiting as many voters as possible to vote for the Green Party in the next federal election, who do not presently have any seats in the House of Commons. This will give a strong message to the Canadian government that they cannot easily ignore us.

II) By recruiting new candidates who will run for the Green Party or be independent and who do NOT support the Government of Canada’s decision which recognises Kosovo

Contact Info

City/Town: Ottawa, ON

Now that’s a mission statement I can get behind!After weeks on the fence, I’m totally voting Conservative.

Palin/Harper 2016!

Hi Katey
not sure if this will help. did a whois lookup on that IP address. It’s an older IPv4 assigned internet protocol. You’ll see that the IP block is reserved for ‘special purposes’ but that doesn’t mean this email came from IANA – they only administer the addresses. (this link http://iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/
takes you to the names of organizations with special assignments) You can contact IANA to find out perhaps, their phone number is below.

Here’s what ARIN had to say:

OrgName: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
OrgID: IANA
Address: 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
City: Marina del Rey
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 90292-6695
Country: US

NetRange: 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255
CIDR: 10.0.0.0/8
NetName: RESERVED-10
NetHandle: NET-10-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType: IANA Special Use
NameServer: BLACKHOLE-1.IANA.ORG
NameServer: BLACKHOLE-2.IANA.ORG
Comment: This block is reserved for special purposes.
Comment: Please see RFC 1918 for additional information:
Comment: http://www.arin.net/reference/rfc/rfc1918.txt
RegDate:
Updated: 2007-11-27

OrgAbuseHandle: IANA-IP-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number
OrgAbusePhone: +1-310-301-5820
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@iana.org

OrgTechHandle: IANA-IP-ARIN
OrgTechName: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number
OrgTechPhone: +1-310-301-5820
OrgTechEmail: abuse@iana.org

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-09-21 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN’s WHOIS database.

Heh, I didn’t even notice my post was linked to in the update until this morning when I had hits coming from MacLeans!
I was out having fun last night and didn’t have time to do techy research into this. But there are capabable bloggers on the trail, along with the ‘spies that shall not be named’ apparently too. Too cool.

Kady – Point of clarification: you just need to create a personality/profile/identity, depending on what your email client calls it, purporting to be “Stephen Harper ” in order to be able to play all sorts of pranks on those who would expect or welcome a message from the PM. If a reporter received an email from the PM inviting them to 24 Sussex for an exclusive interview, or some other equally plausible thing, how would they know that it’s legit and not the result of some prank?

We’ve all seen spam where the “From” address is an address we recognize, sometimes even our own. Clearly, it doesn’t take make to spoof an email address.

This “attack” was not a work of great genius and it did not require any technical skills beyond the abilities of a capable 14 year-old. If someone is apprehended, it will be interesting to see what, if any, charges are laid.

Personally, I cannot see political opponents from any of the parties doing something like this. There is no “win” in this for political opponents and anyone with even half a brain could tell the message was a spoof. It’s more likely just a prank rather than an action intended to gain political advantage, though it could be a misguided supporter of one of the political opponents of the Conservatives.

Either the author of the message was deliberately trying to come across as an adolescent or it is really an adolescent with the poor writing skills that is all-too-common amongst the youth of today, viz, “here me roar”. I found the escaping of the double quotes with backslashes to be interesting. I wonder if that is what was really sent in the original message or if the backslashes were added along the way. If they were in the original, it suggests someone with just enough tech skills to be dangerous. Normally, one would never have to worry about escaping punctuation in email messages.

If there is a lesson in all this, it should be that we all need to start using strong cryptography to digitally sign messages. That is the only way to establish the true identity of the sender. If we became accustomed to receiving only digitally signed messages, anything that wasn’t would be suspect by default.

Mark Allan Whittle, what are you talking about? That BS might go over well with the Hamilton Spectator or CH News but some outside of Hamilton have a small bit of intelligence

It takes one person amongst thousands who thinks their clever enough to ping an IP address and get a spoofing program to change the packet info on the TCP/IP protocol from that Privy Council email server. According to IT security specialists its a loophole in the older version 4

According to the G&M, the PM asked the ‘spooks’ to see if there ‘might’ be a way to access their server but the G&M used language that indicated an’investigation’ – not that there was one. That’s probably their own hype.

There’s a difference between email spoofing on the outside of an organization’s network which isn’t illegal (unless they are asking for money or your credit card info) and access to internal servers from the outside with malicious intent, which is. That’s something the Privy Council’s IT specialists would be investigating themselves

There is no way in hell I’ll believe the IT security people within the Privy
Council office would leave themselves that vulnerable and not put in spoof filters.