Earlier this week investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson released new information to the New York Post, which is further detailed in her forthcoming book Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, about the hacking of her personal and work computers last year. After an analysis by a close source familiar with hacking systems and spyware Attkisson, who has worked extensively on stories like Benghazi and Operation Fast and Furious, alleged that someone in the federal government had entered her computer, deleted information and even planted classified documents in hopes of potentially prosecuting her or a source during a leak investigation.
In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.
“This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America,” Attkisson quotes the source saying.
Attkisson says the source, who’s “connected to government three-letter agencies,” told her the computer was hacked into by “a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.”
The breach was accomplished through an “otherwise innocuous e-mail” that Attkisson says she got in February 2012, then twice “redone” and “refreshed” through a satellite hookup and a Wi-Fi connection at a Ritz-Carlton hotel.
The spyware included programs that Attkisson says monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and the passwords to her financial accounts.
“The intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool,” she wrote in “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.”
Now, there's video showing what Attkisson described. While working at home on a story about Benghazi, Attkisson's computer appears to have been taken over and entire paragraphs of information were deleted.
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