on Tuesday night, a spokeswoman for MSNBC shared several documents with CNNMoney, including a statement from an independent security consultant named Jonathan Nichols, who said he has "significant evidence" that some of the recently circulated posts are bogus.
In his statement, Nichols said that he "discovered that login information used to access the blog was available on the Dark Web and that fraudulent entries -- featuring offensive statements -- were entered with suspicious formatting and time stamps."
"At no time has Ms. Reid claimed that the Wayback Machine was hacked, though early in our investigation, we were made aware of a breach at archive.org which may have correlated with the fraudulent blog posts we observed on their website," Nichols said. "We simply wanted to ascertain whether that breach was related to the compromising of Ms. Reid's blog."
The MSNBC spokesperson also provided letters sent in December from Reid's attorney to Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which owned the site on which Reid's blog was hosted at the time of the disputed posts, and Internet Archive, which runs the Wayback Machine, to alert the companies of the alleged hacking. CNNMoney has reached out to Alphabet for comment. The MSNBC spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up inquiry regarding Alphabet's response.
Nichols said that many of the posts in question were published at a time when Reid was hosting a radio show, and that the "text and visual styling was inconsistent with her original entries."
He added that "some of the recently circulated posts were not even on the site at any time, suggesting that these instances may be the result of screenshot manipulation."
Reid's attorney, John H. Reichman, highlighted what he said was another discrepancy in his letters to the companies, pointing out that Reid published posts on January 10, 2006 about the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito at 10:18 a.m., 11:34 a.m. and 11:41 a.m., but that the archive showed what Reichman described as a "lengthy, fraudulent entry" at 11:28 a.m.
"Ms. Reid did not have the superhuman blogging skills needed to do all of these posts simultaneously," Reichman wrote.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/25/media/joy-reid-msnbc-host-wayback-machine/index.html
Again, in my other post, the security holes specifically related to the Wayback Machine have already been documented (and demonstrated) by researchers at Wellesley. People are incorrectly assuming that the archive is foolproof evidence, and that is not the case. People should become educated on this type of attack so it doesn't interfere with our upcoming elections.
https://repository.wellesley.edu/scholarship/158/
= new reply since forum marked as read
