Hacking into the mind of the CRU climate change hacker ( how did climategate happen?)

Guardian (UK) ^ | Friday 5 February 2010 07.30 GMT | Charles Arthur

[6SJ7]

Hacker in staged photograph surrounded by computers.

That is indeed a silly photo; staged to make it look like a prototypical nerd hiding in a dark basement. A hacker could just as well be sitting in a local coffee shop with a laptop taking advantage of the free WiFi. More likely, in fact, because the local coffee shop's WiFi is likely open access.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ROFL!

No sign of a simple laptop in there....gotta have raw compute power for the big jobs....

[cripplecreek]

He probably runs them off a gasoline generator too.

[steelyourfaith]

Thanx !

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[a fool in paradise]

Analysis by the Guardian and digital forensics experts suggests that an outside hacker gained access to a server at the UEA which held backups of CRU emails and a collection of staff documents.

Or that an internal whistleblower was smart enough to do the expose from an external computer.

[a fool in paradise]

The photo is racist. It suggests that white Westerners are hackers. The Chi-coms have hackers on staff.

[a fool in paradise]

Meanwhile MSNBC is only looking at the emails they want to examine:

Palin e-mails reveal a powerful ‘first dude’ (MSNBC.com ^ | February 4, 2010 | By Bill Dedman)

[Marine_Uncle]

I believe the files where not ftp'ed or downloaded by other means from the CRU servers to another system but that someone working at CRU with root privileges set, perhaps an administrator, and or an actual root user level (they can get at anything on a system ... they own the system by default) assemble a number of files such as the emails for each user's email, copied into own directory space, then carefully gziped them then sent them out to a few individuals elsewhere with the notice they all had some 48 hours or whatever to do what they wanted to do.
As a root user on any UNIX system or Linux system I can view ,modify, delete, copy any file on the entire system if I so please to. And that of course holds true for the other UNIX variants as well as Sun Solaris systems.
An outsider would have had to gain root privilege in order to view the individual email users directories and stored emails as well as files used for the modeling etc..
Of course an insider who had root user level could have had an agreement with someone on the outside of the server(s) to during a brief period of time be granted what we call super user (su command in UNIX). The insider would have granted them SU privileges. Then once the access was complete, files copied by various means, removed the SU privilege. They then could have doctored the file that stores SU access to obliterate any reference to the so called hackers login name.
In the past I had given certain individuals su level access to do something on a given UNIX system I maintained. Very easy stuff to do when one is root user.