White Collar Crime News

Why Congressman Anthony Weiner was not hacked and why he claims he was June 1, 2011

Unless you live under a rock, you have most likely heard that about the Anthony Weiner twitter scandal.  Updated info is here.  The latest now is that he cannot deny that the picture is him which is basically saying that the pic is really him.  After all, if you took a picture of your crotch, wouldn’t you remember it?  Wouldn’t you be able to identify your body parts in a picture?  Exactly.  So, lets assume that the pic is him.

If Congressman Weiner’s story is true, you would have to believe that he has a pic of his crotch just sitting on his computer.  Then, he would have had to have left his computer on but unattended.  Some hacker then uses a Trojan horse or some other method to hack into his computer.  This evil hacker, who can do anything to this computer and access any file, decides to go through his pictures.  Out of all of the information on this computer, this one picture is the key piece of information that the hacker seizes upon.  Now the hacker has to decide what to do with it.  I know, says the hacker to himself, I’ll open up his web browser and see, if by chance, he has saved any of his passwords.  What luck, the Congressman saved his twitter password so that he can be automatically logged in.  At this point, the hacker can then take over the twitter account and post all sorts of crazy things.  Nope, the hacker would rather send the image to some random girl, Gennette Cordova, (who just happens to be pretty) that follow him on twitter.  After that, the hacker clearly feels as if he/she has accomplished everything there was to accomplish and then he/she moves on without creating any other havoc.  Then, the Congressman quickly learns of the evil deed and tweets that he has been hacked.  All of this sounds a little crazy, huh?

If you are thinking that there may be other options here as to how this could have occurred, consider these points:

1.  The picture clearly seems to be him.  Thus, there is no way a hacker would have gotten into this computer and then separately hacked into the twitter account.

2.  The twitter account is a verified account and if hacked, twitter would have pulled the account.

3.  If twitter itself was hacked, it would have called in the FBI to investigate.  Furthermore, as a soon to be public company, their security is important.

4.  The hacker would have changed the password.

Clearly, Congressman Weiner cannot admit to sending a picture of his crotch to some young woman.  It would ruin his career and probably ruin his new marriage.  He screwed up and got caught.  His story is crazy but you cannot prove him wrong as he will not allow anyone to have access to the evidence that can prove his story.  I find it odd that a Congressman is permitted to go on TV and lie (more so than normal) and just get away with it.  Twitter has to be concerned at some point here as they do not want the public to think that their system is not secure.  They plan to go public sooner or later and they do not need a Congressman telling the world that his verified account was not secure.

In the end, the media should stop playing into the theory that he could have been hacked.  He wasn’t.  He did it.  Let’s move on.