The hacking of CIA Director John Brennan's AOL account gains credibility
The "﻿Italian"﻿ behind the hacking of the CIA Director's AOL account has passed his cache to WikiLeaks, which said it will soon publish ﻿the content, posting a teaser of six documents last night. To all intents and purposes it appears that there is an actual stream of emails and documents﻿ from Mr Brennan's AOL account from during his time as CIA ﻿﻿Station Chief in Riyadh. His security clearance SF86 file﻿ from 2008 was also included in the content, however this could also have been bought off the dark-web, following the recent OPM hack. The issue is, why was a very senior CIA station chief using an insecure AOL account in the first place? Cyber security experts Sophus, believe that the hack was actually achieved by social media engineering and involved two hackers rather than one "teenager". "Brennan-gate"﻿﻿ will doubtless rumble on.﻿﻿

WikiLeaks has released a cache of e-mails which the site says were retrieved from CIA Director John Brennan's AOL account.

The e-mails include Brennan's SF86, a form that he had to fill out to get his current position and security clearance. The form, from 2008, "reveals a quite comprehensive social graph of the current Director of the CIA with a lot of additional non-governmental and professional/military career details," according to WikiLeaks' description of the document.

The published materials also include Brennan's recommendations to the US President about how to manage affairs related to Iran and a letter from Senator Kit Bond, vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that details how to "make future interrogation methods 'compliant' and 'legal,'" WikiLeaks states.

Further Reading Hack of OPM reportedly exposed second set of much more sensitive data

The e-mails were acquired earlier this week by a hacker who published some of the information on Twitter before his account was suspended on Monday. The hacker, who calls himself CWA and told Ars he is an Italian activist living in New York, told the New York Post he committed the hacks to support Palestine and Gaza. He told the Post that he is a high school student.

CWA also claimed to have breached an e-mail account belonging to Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Officials told The New York Times that Johnson didn't actively use that account, which may have come as part of a Comcast cable package.

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The Times further reported that there is nothing "classified or hip" in Brennan's AOL account, and it dates to the days when he was CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. However, if accurate, the material is at least sensitive, given that the SF86 form discloses contact information for Brennan's relatives and professional connections.

The files published earlier by the hacker include a spreadsheet with contact information for high-level government employees, which appears to be some kind of access list for an event. CWA said he accessed Brennan's account by tricking Verizon employees into giving out his personal information.