WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s claim that a 14-year-old could have hacked the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman has inspired a thorough explanation of why that almost certainly didn’t happen.
Assange said the accessing of John Podesta’s emails was due to an obvious choice of password during an interview with Fox News at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
He told presenter Sean Hannity: “A 14-year-old kid could have hacked Podesta that way.”
And President-Elect Donald Trump later tweeted: “Julian Assange said ‘a 14-year-old could have hacked Podesta’ - why was [Democratic National Committee] so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”
However Matt Tait, a information security researcher who posts under the Twitter name Pwn All The Things, has issued a new analysis to prove Assange’s claim false.
Tait tweeted: “Could [a 14-year-old] have? Sure. Did hack? No. Let me go through why not.”
Note: Tait uses graphs from Secure Works.
Assange’s interview was used by Trump to again cast doubt on US intelligence officials’ conclusion that Russia was behind hacks during the presidential election that boosted his candidacy.
Assange denied Russia was the source of a hack on the Democratic National Committee despite the FBI and Department of Homeland Security having released an extensive report last week, detailing evidence that Russia was in fact behind the attacks.
Answering criticism for his repeating of Assange’s claim, Trump tweeted on Thursday: “The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange - wrong.
“I simply state what he states, it is for the people to make up their own minds as to the truth.
“The media lies to make it look like I am against “Intelligence” when in fact I am a big fan!”