Press

Weaver is a network-security expert at the International Computer Science Institute, a research center in Berkeley, California. Together with other researchers, he helped pinpoint the targets of the attack: two GitHub-hosted projects connected to GreatFire.org, a China-based anti-censorship organization.

“Cell phone networks are deliberately insecure in order to enable wiretapping,” said Nick Weaver, a staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute. “Using Chinese-built infrastructure is just asking to say, ‘Let Chinese intelligence conduct wiretaps,’ since the infrastructure itself is designed to support such meddling.”

“Their reputation is warranted and they are very good. They have worked for both parties for years now,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer security expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Criticism of CrowdStrike's job in both cases is unfair. They are an incident response team: You bring them in AFTER the manure has hit the 3 MW wind turbine. So it is unfair to complain about a mess,” Weaver said in an email.

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and lecturer at UC Berkeley, said the API should have validated that the account making the request had permission to read the data requested.“It seems like the only access control they had in place was that you were logged in at all. And if you can access other peoples’ data because they aren’t enforcing access controls on reading that data, it’s catastrophically bad and I’m willing to bet they’re not enforcing controls on writing to that data as well.”