Mummy, they hacked me!
Zomm ftit ghax ghandi bzonn nibghat daqxejn flirtatious email li dik tal-RTK ghax tiffansjani
Kicking up a storm about hacking is the new fashion.
First Jeffrey and Varist did it (the Men in Black hacked their phones).
So it was only a matter of time before the man called Joseph tried it too. This is the way it works. Embarrassing or compromising information is leaked to the press. Instead of dealing with the content, you try to distract attention away from it by focussing on how they got hold of it. If you can, scream about illegality and make as much noise as possible.
With luck, by the time you’ve finished screaming and shouting (and banging like Godfrey Grima) people will have forgotten that the story was actually about the leaked information, not how the information was leaked.
Hacking, my eye. Hacking means somebody from the outside breaking through the protective cyber walls and getting into your stuff. It’s bloody difficult to do, and rest assured that if somebody had actually hacked the Leader of the Opposition’s personal Gmail account, they wouldn’t have just left with a few exchanges with an RTK journalist.
There would be reams of material a la Wikileaks.
No, it’s obvious what happened here. Occam’s Razor, remember. Organisations like the political parties and radio stations have their own internal server and don’t use an external service. The organisation or company bosses have full access to and control over anything passing through that server, because it is done on company time.
If Sabrina Agius sent and received her emails while at the office, they would have been recorded and retained by the office server. That would explain why there are apparent gaps in the information. Those would be the emails she sent and received while at home.
The second bit is obvious too, the way I see it. RTK never bothered to check through the server records to see what kinds of emails its employees sent out. But when Sabrina Agius decided to take legal action against them for not promoting her to editor, they did the first thing an employer does in these cases when preparing their case: go through her emails.
And some of those emails were made public, whether intentionally or not. Good luck to them. Most people would have done the same, faced with such contentious information about an employee making a very public case against them and talking about political discrimination.
How did I conclude that the emails weren’t picked up through the Malta Labour Party’s server? Well, that’s simple, isn’t it. Anybody with access to that server wouldn’t have picked up just his email exchange with Sabrina Agius.
Do you know what the worst thing is about all this? It’s not Joseph Muscat’s manipulation of a woman who is clearly infatuated with him (“Use me as you wish”) or the fact that he speaks about needing her planted at RTK but would prefer to have her planted at The Times.
It’s his bloody awful ignorance in putting things like this down in writing, and his even worse ignorance in not knowing that internal company servers retain and record information, so that if his Miss Sabrina was at the office, RTK’s office server would have logged his correpondence with her.
Tal-biki. Jew tal-biza. Ma nafx.
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“Dr Joseph Muscat called for an investigation of the PN and its media following their reference to private correspondence with RTK journalist Sabrina Agius.” – Maltastar, 20 October 2011.
Joseph Muscat is showing a serious case of wanting to gag the media and to control the publication of his scandals – so he is asking for an investigatation of the PN media.
Had this case been about private persons, he would be right.
However, this case is about him as the Leader of the Opposition and of his party, and one of his future cabinet ministers.
He cannot pretend the media to treat him the same.
Joseph Muscat committed serious mistakes in his dealings with Ms. Agius, and is now messing it up further by asking for an investigation of the media.
No politician in a democratic country will ever do that. The only way for politicians in cases which they themselves allege to be serious like this is for them to choose the way out.
Inspector Clouseau! So straight and simple logistics! You should have known better Ms Agius or should I say Hon Minister Agius…
It should be logics and nor logistics…oooppss lapsus..
Makes sense. As The Times so aptly put it, they keep shooting themselves in the foot.
Two popular techniques:
– She left the Gmail account open and someone quickly hit the “Forward” or “Print” buttons.
– She printed the correspondence for some obscure reason and someone picked them up from the printer.
Anyone at middle management level should know this. It’s one of the methods employed by senior management for periodic appraisals of one’s capabilities to manage their staff.
Such documentation is usually provided during these sessions to iron out any erratic office dynamics.
Gives us a clue to his level of experience and cheek. Imagine this clerk accessing sensitive information relating to foreign affairs.
As for his use of email, which is nothing more than putting in writing his sly scheming from the comfort of his office, it only indicates an indolence in the way of his ambition.
One smarmy git.
I suspect the story is much less complicated. She left her PC unlocked when she went out to lunch and some employee just opened her gmail web-client.
A password wouldn’t be needed since the login cookie wouldn’t have expired.
The scanned documents are printouts directly from the gmail page.
At some point up the chain, 3 or 4 pages were discarded.
This could have been negligence or perhaps they contained something incriminating to the informant(s).
It is really hard for companies to track employees’ Gmail usage since gmail will always try to use https to log you in. Even if they did manage to intercept her emails, they certainly would not appear in the format presented in the scanned PDF.
Why is Joseph so surprised about the leak of his emails?
I know of a case where someone went into somebody else’s apartment late at night, turned on that somebody’s computer, stole pics of that somebody naked and then sent them to that somebody’s employer and colleagues.
And the worst bit of this is that Joseph Muscat harbored and defended that someone.
I’m afraid you are probably not correct. Services such as GMail use HTTPS, so traffic is encrypted between the end points. I’m not sure what yahoo.com, live.com or other popular services use.
On the other hand, if she used the company mail servers, such as MS Exchange, then they will have a copy of all emails she ever sent, whether it is from home or from the office.
No wonder they hate you so much. You have the guts to expose them for what they are.
They think that we are all morons and they can fool us all, all the time.
Hacking, my foot! But that’s what he will keep on saying on and on and on and the faithful screaming SHAME.
Good one: I cheat and if I get caught I play the victim.
Been having quite a few of them on ONE TV lately.
Daphne, just a point for clarification.
You said they used Gmail accounts.
[Daphne – She did and he did not.]
That would mean the emails were likely sent either via gmail’s encrypted web interface, or encrypted SMTP server. So they wouldn’t necessarily be stored on RTK’s servers (not saying it’s impossible to intercept, just that you have to go out of your way to do it).
Do you have the headers of the email? They could highlight which servers were used.
The fact that not all emails are available raises the suspicion, not just that she emailed from home, but that there was a backchannel for more discussion – and we don’t know what it was (more email, phone, meet-ups?) and what more was said.
Just seen the published PDF – which appears to be a print out from Gmail, rather than server logs.
The format of the PDF suggests they were printed via Mrs. Agius’ email account (using Gmail’s print feature) and consequently that her account has been compromised (or that she supplied them).
All this talk of hacking is very ill-advised because either way it cannot be proven – she may simply have saved her email password on the computer, or not logged out. That would leave Muscat with MORE explaining he won’t do.
The other point this raises is that whoever supplied these must have all the other conversations.
Tal- biza, my friend! It just shows us what is ready for us if we are foolish!
… and i thought it was a tad coquettish
Your analysis would make sense (re. emails being retained by the office server) except for the fact that Sabrina Agius is clearly using her Gmail addy, therefore her emails are not going through the office email server at all.
In support of this is that the PDF scan that has been published in the media was clearly printed out through the Gmail web interface.
That means that it is probably her Gmail account that was hacked, given that if Joseph Muscat’s were hacked, we would undoubtedly have been presented with plenty more juicy tidbits.
She probably just rushed to a meeting forgetting to close her Gmail window and to lock her pc, at which point an enterprising colleague could easily have scanned her Gmail inbox, zeroed in on the offending conversation and printed it out.
To be honest I doubt that RTK’s server would handle incoming and outgoing mails from Gmail (outgoing only if she has set up Gmail in a desktop client and use their e-mail server to send through).
More likely it is someone sitting down on her computer, being authenticated to her Gmail and simply printing off the e-mails.
Either way it’s not hacking, but the latter would be unethical.
Although it’s worth pointing out that it’s much less unethical than her actions as described in the e-mail exchange.
Not that I feel sorry for the turd, but how could the media have got hold of the emails. Could it be that Sabrina gave them to the press?
[Daphne – What, in a bunny-boiler moment, as she lay alone in bed thinking of him with Michelle and/or the teddies?]
Who knows how many similar exchanges Joseph Muscat has had with other ‘independent’ journalists.
How many other stooges – not only in the media – have been led to believe that they could become cabinet ministers?
[Daphne – John Bundy has clearly had the PBS carrot held out to him. He says repeatedly that his agreement with Labour is that he will stay with Super One until the general election. The intimation is that there is something better for him after that.]
Technical niggle for you – if she sent emails from home, they still would have gone through the office server (and been recorded) unless she used a private email account. Is that what you mean?
Also, I wouldn’t say that hacking is bloody difficult (your skill set might vary, of course) but I would question whether it is worth hacking the Leader of the Opposition’s personal GMail account.
There may be better ways of getting to that information without having to resort to hacking. But maybe that’s just me.
The next Prime Minister…
You forgot one thing. Gmail is full session SSL for a number of years.
Now with all your IT knowledge please explain to the public what full session SSL means. Thank you very much.
Insomma, the man is not up to his job, and time is proving so.
Your story is plausible, but there are some inaccuracies. Joseph Muscat’s email is not registered with Gmail (you can see his email address on the emails leaked). He uses a private domain, which everyone in the I.T. sector knows is not as secure as Gmail.
Sabrina Agius was using a Gmail account, and the connection for any Gmail login is always ‘secure’ meaning it is encrypted from the user computer up to Gmail’s own servers, so any of the data passing through a middle server is encrypted and cannot be read by third parties, including work servers.
The only explanation if you are pointing fingers at RTK is that they installed some spy programme on her computer (which is still illegal in the EU, contrary to the USA where the employer can install any program on your work computer).
Having said that and having cast my doubts on this theory, I must add that had the PN media or someone else hacked Joseph Muscat’s email would he be bothered with such petty issues?
[Daphne – Petty isses? My god, they’re not petty at all. What is this country?]
I think there might be thousands of jucier emails related to the divorce issue, budget, correspondence with other MPs and who knows what.
I am not sure you are correct. The PDF published by the PN seems to come from Sabrina Agius’s Gmail account. If you try printing off any email from Gmail you get your own email address at the top of the page, which you can see in the PDF.
I would go with an even simpler explanation: she used a computer (at work probably) and forgot to log out and did not turn it off. Someone else then printed the stuff out. Not sure it is entirely legal, but at least people get more reasons why they shouldn’t vote Labour.
Your last three paragraphs still hold, however: you have to be really daft to write these things down and assume none of it will ever be leaked.
One should look back to see what kind of questions she asked Joseph Muscat during John Bundy’s Affari Taghna programme, when Muscat was the guest.
Hawwadni ha nifmek.
Imma Joey klavar hi, ghax mhux Friend ta’ Sabrina fuq Fejsbuk. Dak email juza maggha ghax sejf.
Mela ejja iss Sabrina for minister of Communications, jew jekk ma titlghax sa 2018, il hed of Sacretariat Kastilja, ”ghax did ghenitna l-ahwa”……..u bejitna niffansjah.
zorro, attent b’dik l-ahhar kelma ghax donnok qed tinsinwa xi haga. “niffansjah”!! kulhadd jaf li jowzef….
And if we have to be brutally honest, that she sent these emails on company time should be the least of RTK’s worries.
Ms. Agius was using a web-based email service, hence the correspondence would not be saved on her employer’s servers unless the allowed her to set up a Gmail account on the company exchange servers (which I cannot really imagine ).
Nevertheless, they were sent during office hours (some, not all emails), most probably through use of company resources (time, internet connection).
Having said that, it is not about how the mails were found, it is about what it is all about..
It is really quite sad…
THEY GOTTIM
He is stupid but not THAT stupid to put all this crap in writing.
He must have got somewhat carried away by a female admirer’s adulation.
The Italians put it this way :
Una gonna tira quanto cento buoi.
And that’s a lot for most men.
Who’s the wanker now Joseph?
Mela Joseph self employed?
Hi,
It’s been reported about a couple of ago that Muammar has been captured. There are conflicting reports saying he’s dead or been shot in the leg. This happened during an attempt of fleeing from Sirte in three separate convoys.
I’m in the Libyan desert and whilst all my Libyan colleagues are (rightfully so) celebrating, I would rather wait a while for a confirmation.
Sorry, that should have read “a couple of hours ago”
She was using Gmail; that goes through an encrypted connection from her browser to the Google servers. Such a connection cannot be intercepted easily.
My guess would be that she left her browser open at work, someone found out and produced a printout before she was back.
What a pathetic little twat.
Daphne, you’re absolutely right in saying that he is trying to distract us from the content of those e-mails.
This is exactly why Joseph doesn’t deserve an office in Castille.
Imbaghad il-PL l-ewwel li johrog bis-slogans bhal “hbieb tal hbieb”. Joseph, man up. Bil-Malti: rabbi l-bajd.
Tal-Biki, tal-biza, tat-twerwir. Is this the man who wants to be prime minister? I shudder.
The world has just been informed that Gaddafi has been “killed”. Maybe he had his emails and mobile telephone conversations hacked which led to his defeat.
Only if emails are stored on servers which are owned by a particular organisation can they be accessed or modified by an IT administrator. For this reason, electronic correspondence stored on one’s own servers is not admissible as evidence due to the relative ease by which it can be altered.
In the published emails, Sabrina Agius used her Gmail account which is mostly improbable to have been hacked into by some local techie.
No RTK employee or server can gain unauthorised access to her Gmail account just because it happens to be in the same building in which Sabrina works.
Joseph Muscat’s emails are stored on a mail exchange rented from a US-based hosting company. Again, it is highly unlikely that these have been hacked into by somebody in Malta.
From the document available on Maltarightnow, it seems that Sabrina Agius’ emails were printed while being logged into her Gmail account. This is not difficult especially since many of us do not bother to log out from websites before getting away from the PC.
I believe that tapping into phone lines is far more easier than getting into email accounts.
This is why I find JPO and Evarist’s claims more credible than Joseph Muscat’s.
Good information. Thanks for sharing.
A Labour policy at last: planting moles in the media.
I’m sorry but your conclusions about RTK being the source of the leak does not make sense. I’ve seen the “raw PDFs” that Malta Today has made available and they clearly show Sabrina using her personal Gmail account ([email protected]).
For RTK’s mail server to pick up her email, she must be using their server to access her personal mailbox (ie their server is configured to access her Gmail account and download a local copy).
Most people use a browser to access Gmail or configure their Outlook to connect to Gmail’s mail server directly.
It is more probably that she left her computer unattended, with her Gmail account logged in, and someone had a field day printing emails.
In fact, the printouts are what you get when you print a Gmail email from a browser, complete with formating and Gmail logo.
How stupid they both are. Whatever you write is stored and can be used against you. Can’t they see it?
No wonder she wasn’t made head of news. She isn’t very bright.
Joseph Muscat was just leading her on, taking whatever she was offering. And she was stupid enough to document it all in an email sent from a PC that she doesn’ t own.
First the all out attack on WE, and now this email.
Seems Labour never learns the lesson…they keep stumbling in their own feet as election time approaches
This really does clarify a lot and it’s terrifying to think he could end up leading our government. A little correction, mails sent from home would still pass through the company’s mail server so they would still be stored and accessible to them(if still using her company email). Her location is irrelevant, it only depends on the email address she was using.
I had not read your previous blog entry so I misunderstood. If they were communicating through gmail addresses, then RTK would not have been able to access their mails (at least not easily). This sort of data would be transferred over https (unless one of them turned it off which is improbable) and would be encrypted. Of course anything passing through there connection could be intercepted but this is not the sort of data that would normally be stored. Unless they had been monitoring her for months then I really cannot see how they did this. I’s really curious to know how this happened, hopefully it will eventually come out.
It would be difficult (nearly impossible actually) if she was using her own laptop at the RTK premises.
However if she was using a company PC or laptop it could easily have monitoring software on it which would have access to the browser itself ahead of the encryption.
At the very simplest there could simply be someone monitoring what is being showed on her display and just take screenshots. If they already suspected something then that would be very easy.
However as I said before I see it more likely that someone simply guessed her password and accessed her Gmail account direclty.
All the security technology in the world couldn’t protect her against her own dumb choice of password (except by refusing weak passwords, which gmail does not).
I was always taught- think simple.
Te most probable scenario is that she left the computer unlocked and thus anyone can enter her Gmail account or if this happened after her suspension and if she was using the company’s computer, then the administrator could have changed her local password and if she (most probably) saved her Gmail account password, it is again an easy step to browse her emails with ease.
So for sure no case of hacking but simple administrator task once an employee is suspended or kicked out of work.
The wannabe PM is still the inane Super 1 reporter
Genuine question for the techies. If you access Gmail over a secure connection (https), can your data still be sniffed over the intranet?
She might also have left her Gmail password saved in her browser on her work PC, but this would constitute illegal access by her employer anyway, I guess.
if it’s https not http – unlikely – difficult – but not impossible to snif while in transit. But hacking a gmail or hotmail account is not very difficult using the right tools and skills
HTTPS can’t be sniffed while in transit because all of the data passes through an encrypted “tunnel”, which is too strong too attack using brute force, i.e., trying all of the possible combinations to crack the key. No computer has enough processing muscle to compute and try all the combinations in a reasonable amount of time.
What hackers usually do in these circumstances is to infect one of the peers in the conversation with a malicious program such as as a key logger to sniff the data before it goes into the tunnel and transmit it to the hacker.
Check the email headers. Sabrina’s email were sent via gmail. They did not go via the office servers so RTK would have no record of such email.
Joseph Muscat is using a secure third party email provider, not Gmail or MITA’s servers. That’s why Tonio Borg has no problem with an investigation – they will find nothing.
The only way into Joseph’s account is either knowing the account password, or via malware on his machine.
Using Occam’s razor, the most likely explanation is that Sabrina simply left her office machine unlocked while she had Gmail open in a browser and someone printed out the emails. This would also explain the gaps between the emails – the snooping would be done only when Sabrina left her machine unlocked and unattended for a long enough period.
[Daphne – Yes, I’ve been thinking about it through the day and I agree with you.]
‘Hacking’ sounds cool. In reality most ‘hacking’ involves nothing more than simple user error or basic social engineering. Unfortunately, that is often enough to gain access to most people’s confidential information.
Long Live the Barbarians – your allies and those of the West.
Killing Gaddafi Spares ICC Embarrassment For US & Britain:
http://www.infowars.com/killing-gaddafi-spares-icc-embarrassment-for-us-britain/
Lies behind the `Humanitarian War` in Libya (video) and the testimony of Lizzy Phelan:
http://www.ukipmeps.org/blog_view_5556_Lies-behind-the-%60Humanitarian-War%60-in-Libya-video.html
Very credible websites, Kevvy. Right up there with Maltastar and Malta Today,
The Barbarians savaging Gaddafi’s dead body are the ones who are credible, Purdie – or did you miss the video?
[Daphne – What would you have done, Kevin: told him to come along while smartly snapping on a pair of handcuffs?]
We are having an intelligent discussion and along comes Kev with his non-sequitur.
What’s wrong with you, kev? Us boys used to love war. Or have we been corrupted by too much Harry Potter?
bahnan
“The organisation or company bosses have full access to and control over anything passing through that server, because it is done on company time.”
The more the PN screws up the more absurd your justifications become
[Daphne – The PN has nothing to do with this. Nor do I. It’s between the Labour Party, RTK, Joseph Muscat and his little friend Sabrina Agius. Giving away company information and doing this kind of thing on company time (and even not on company time) is a sacking offence. Try working at a private company and denigrating your boss and your workplace in emails to the Opposition leader or anyone else and see whether it gets you a raise or the boot.]
@Ms DCG., how come everyone seems to be missing the wood for the trees? Your comment is exactly what this is all about. Employees have been sacked abroad simply because their employers disapproved of the “friends” on their employees’ Facebook, or for unwise or discreet comments passed by their employees on their Facebooks. Maybe you should write an article on the subject of the advisability for discretion by employees when referring to their workplace or employer on the social networks.
Joseph is clearly a threat to democracy. Planting moles in the media is certainly not a democratic way of winning the public’s trust.
And that’s not even mentioning the immoral aspect of this practice.
This was not a careless ‘one off’ incident but a multi-month correspondence back and forth between Joseph and a disloyal employee at RTK whose aim was to see the Labour Party victorious, thus enhancing her personal chances of advancement through illicit means.
[Daphne – The future prime minister, actually encouraging an employee to do her employers in. Incredible.]
When one thinks that the Labour Party has reached rock-bottom, they dig some more.
And to think that JPO and Franco are supplying them with bigger shovels!
A terse statement from a very reliable source, one of 177 comments on the Times regarding the subject of ‘hacking’
Victor Laiviera
Today, 14:52
Hacking – a criminal offence.
A notable absentee is Charles J Buttigieg of Mellieha.
Alfred Sant must be thinking of taking over from Joseph who has failed in every respect and now is at a loss of how to justify the series of correspondence with Sabrina Agius.
Dan veru partit maghqud!
A prime minister in the making
tal-biza’ ……………………………
shivers down my spine
This is what Victor Laiviera had to say on the Times about Gaddafi’s death:
Victor Laiviera
Today, 17:19
This is a godsend for the PN as it will distract attention away from the Hacking Scandal.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20111020/world/world-greets-gaddafi-s-death-as-end-of-despotism.390032
Someone should call for the resignation of Dr Joseph Muscat as leader of the opposition. His behaviour is not befitting.
Nixtieq tiddedika din id-diska lil Joseph u Sabrina, biex ikunu happie everr after.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3p3kOIlBrM
If his orthography is anything to go by, then God help us. A list of our future prime minister’s spelling mistakes:
JM version / correct version
qisa / qisha
nsemmu / nsemmghu
nittmaaw / nittamaw
kulhadd / kullhadd
min / minn (fuq li ikkonvincejtni)
Clearly, this entire hacking scandal has nothing to do with the PN. This is RTK’s doing.
It’s so obvious that RTK management wanted rid of silly Sabrina.
Emailing from work was her downfall. All she had to do was leave her Gmail account logged in.
The cookies on the company computer that she used to send her little notes to Joey would’ve saved her username and password.
Any Tom, Dick or Fr Joe could’ve then gone through her email account and found these dodgy emails.
All that person had to do then was circulate the emails to Lou, Sav, yourself Daph or Net News.
RTK management hacked her email. Not Gonzi’s bogeymen.
It’s so obvious.
Lil Ms Agius qatt qalula li ma ghandiex iddardar l-ghajn li trid tixrob minnha?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/19/lord-chief-justice-press-regulation
“……….. the revelation of a public scandal – must be allowed to continue to happen. My own view is that the public value of the second is priceless. Whatever means of regulation are designed to reduce the occasions of unacceptable behaviour by elements of the press they must not simultaneously, even if accidentally, diminish or dilute the ability and power of the press to reveal and highlight true public scandals or misconduct….”
Lord chief justice’s speech on press regulation –
Lord Justice Judge’s keynote at Human Rights Law Conference in London
On the same day of the joeyleaks
tp://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=547625160#!/photo.php?fbid=495148106227&set=t.547625160&type=1
Just look at the comments exchanged…the journalists had Joseph Muscat interviewed…..incidentally, she gives him feedback the following morning….according to the joeyleaks……maybe after a sleepless night…. He replies with a degree of intimacy…she refers to him as Joseph, and he addresses her as ‘sab’ ….
[Daphne – I know, Nigel. It was all up this blog earlier.]