So what happened? Apparently a high school student got Brennans smartphone number and used some clever social engineering to get access to the CIA Director’s account. According to Wired he posed as a Verizon and provided “a fabricated employee Vcode—a unique code he says Verizon assigns to employees—to get the information he was seeking. This included Brennan’s account number, his four-digit PIN, the backup mobile number on the account, Brennan’s AOL email address and the last four digits on his bank card.”
Afterwards it apparently was rather easy: The teenager just had to call AOL, tell them he was locked out of his account, answer a few security questions, et voila. The hacker managed to access 40 mails, a couple of which Brannon apparently had sent to himself from his work address, before the AOL account was finally deleted.
Its now just a battle between me and CIA, they keep taking the account back and I keep taking it back after xD pic.twitter.com/4HdZVWZ7hw
— cracka (@phphax) October 13, 2015
Some of the mails included attached documents, for example a 47 page long security clearance application and a spreadsheet said to contain data of senior intelligence officials.
“It does not appear that any classified information was accessed” meanwhile.. pic.twitter.com/tOSlMtS3Ly — cracka (@phphax) October 19, 2015
A lil bit too personal? Meh, who cares.. #CWA @CIA pic.twitter.com/1AM50k72xr
— cracka (@phphax) October 13, 2015
The teenager shared most of the information on his Twitter account @phphax where he also trolled and taunted the authorities. He also tweeted:
If i go quiet on this account, the CIA losers have found me and I’m being tortured by their stupid methods of ruining a guys thoughts. — cracka (@phphax) October 14, 2015
Well … that might happen sooner rather than later.
