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IF HE'S NOT SAFE, ARE YOU ?

US Intelligence chief has his phone account hacked, calls forwarded to Free Palestine Movement.

Normally when you see a headline referring to intelligence agencies and phone accounts being hacked, you expect in this day and age that it’s law enforcement that is doing the hacking.

But  not in this case.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper appears to have become the latest to fall foul of hackers, after a teenage hacker called “Cracka” broke into a number of online accounts belonging to the spy chief.

Cracka told reported that the accounts accessed included Clapper’s home telephone and internet, his personal email, and his wife Susan’s Yahoo account.

Having allegedly broken into Clapper’s Verizon account, Motherboard reports that the hacker changed its settings to forward all calls to the Free Palestine Movement.

To further back up his claims, the hacker shared with Motherboard a screenshot of what appears to be Susan Clapper’s Verizon account, as well as a list of call logs made to James Clapper’s house.

It’s not entirely clear why Clapper was targeted by the hackers, but it’s true to say that he became notorious in March 2013 when he was questioned by a United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing about whether the NSA “collected any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”.

If the details of the security breach are true, then it is obviously a concern that the hacker was not only able to reroute calls made to Clapper’s home, but also view the phone numbers of people calling him and access personal email accounts.

For that reason, it’s perhaps a relief that those behind the hack were more interested in simply pranking the Director of National Intelligence rather than having something more menacing in mind.

Last October, a group calling itself “Crackas With Attitude” or “CWA” managed to break into the AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan, and claimed to have gained access to the Comcast account of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

At the time, Clapper was said to have been “outraged” by the hacks. No doubt he is feeling even more apoplectic now the hackers have struck closer to home.

This is an excerpt from Tripwire's  "The State of Security".