spy games

Snowden Got Information by Simply Asking for Passwords

FILE - This Sept. 19, 2007, file photo, shows the National Security Agency building at Fort Meade, Md. The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cailf., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Obama administration is defending the National Security Agency's need to collect such records, but critics are calling it a huge over-reach. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)
Photo: Charles Dharapak

After the classified information taken by Edward Snowden started leaking out into the press, NSA officials admitted they had little idea how he got a hold of so much data, some of which he wasn’t authorized to see. Turns out it’s pretty simple; he just asked people for their passwords. “Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator,” Reuters reports, Those people who gave up their passwords have been taken off duty, but according to Reuters it wasn’t clear what rules they actually broke. Beware the IT guy indeed!

Snowden Got Information by Asking for Passwords