In a promotional video earlier this month for a book that details alleged government intrusions with her computer, television and phone, former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson recalled a mysterious incident that occurred while she worked on a “Benghazi-related story.”
As the data was wiped from her laptop at “hyper-speed,” Attkisson said she managed to “get a tilted picture” of the hacking with her cell phone. Now it appears Attkisson is ready to share some of that footage.
In a cell phone video provided to Politico, Attkisson showed how she purportedly lost all control of her computer. Text, some of which included a transcript of an interview conducted by longtime CBS News host Bob Schieffer, can be seen being deleted from a word document.
“I’m not touching it,” Attkisson could be heard saying in the video while Michael Buble’s song “Some Kind of Wonderful” played in the background. A tapping sound could be heard off camera, though it’s unclear what caused it.
The video’s release coincided with the promotional efforts for the book “Stonewalled,” in which Attkisson finally provides specifics on the alleged government surveillance she faced during her time at CBS News. The book is set to be released on Tuesday, but reviews have already been coming out.
In the book, which has been thoroughly dissected by the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, Attkisson wrote that a government source described her computer intrusions as “[w]orse than anything Nixon ever did.”
And after more than a year of dancing around the question of who was responsible for the hacking, Attkisson finally divulged, writing that it was likely done 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.”
“Stonewalled” is filled with pseudonyms, but Attkisson did cite at least one source by name: Don Allison, a consultant at the at the security firm KoreLogic who inspected the compromised computer and told Attkisson that he found an “undeniable link to the U.S. government.”
But neither KoreLogic nor CBS News are talking.
Watch the video, via Politico:
Any hacker software that allows the user to see their files disappear on screen in real time is not very sophisticated.
Tap. tap. tap.
“I’m not touching it.”
Tap. tap. tap.
“I’m not touching it.”
Hoax. Some asshole off screen could’ve been sitting there with a bluetooth keyboard doing it all.
And if what she says is true, then what kind of fucking idiot fails to turn it off and take out the battery to stop the deletions? Clearly, it was more important to her to have a video of her “possessed” computer than it was to save the data.
Computer stalls performing an operation - user mashes keys for several minutes trying to make it respond - operation completes and all those keystrokes are executed.
Hilarious. Funny how the mysterious “clicks” seem to correspond to menus appearing. And a slightly wonky keyboard will do things like that - a slightly sticky DEL key can be lots of fun.