Climate email hackers had access for more than a month

Guardian ^ | 27 November 2009 | Matthew Taylor and Charles Arthur

[ricks_place]

Email sent to weatherman suggests hackers had access to Climatic Research Unit's systems for longer than first suspected

Computer hackers who broke into the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) server at the University of East Anglia had access to its systems for more than a month.

The full data – covering 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents in which the most recent document and email is dated 12 November – came to wider notice when a copy was posted on a web server in Russia on 19 November.

But a month earlier a BBC weatherman who had expressed doubts about climate change on his blog was sent a sample of the email exchanges, suggesting the hackers already had access to the private system.

snip

On 19 November the hackers used a computer in Saudi Arabia to post a link on The Air Vent – a website popular with climate change sceptics – pointing to a fresh copy of the zip file, this time stored on a Russian web server. At that point it was finally picked up by blogs and news organisations around the world.

[ricks_place]

"computer hacker"

There is no evidence of hackers. The FOIA file was likely assembled by CRU internally in response to a FOIA request and inadvertently left on an open ftp site when it couldn't be emailed as an attachment. CRU was already revealed as careless in their alleged AGW research and data archiving. Less plausible, an FOIA-protected whistle blower may have released the file.

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[JPG]

Or could it be the equivalent of an inadvertent ‘reply all’?

[Flavius]

bloody hero

[Duke C.]

I agree with your opinion that the leak was not the result of a hacker. However, our quasi-forensic examination of the FOIA/mail folder indicates that the emails were directly copied from the CRU SMTP mail server, not an email client folder someone was preparing for an FOI request.