CNN: No one cares about Russia

[Tiberius]

That's good info. You have everything laid out pretty good. If all of this is what happens in a Phishing scheme, what would be the difference in forcible hacking vs phishing?

To be clear, a phishing scheme simply covers the first stages of the breach, i.e. how they gained access.

When you gain access to a computer network, everything isn't just accessible and ready for stealing. There are multiple layers of security, this ensures that someone can't just get employed at a bank for example, and access the emails of the CEO.

There really isn't a term "forcible hacking" in the security industry, but what I've taken that to mean is the attacker actively exploiting some system, rather than relying on an employee making a mistake.

The DNC hack employed both. There were likely two phishing schemes, one which sent malicious software via email, in the hopes that a user would run the file, and the other was likely a fake mail website where the hackers would try and trick users into entering their credentials. Both appear to have worked.

However while these attacks would have retrieved a small subset of the emails (as they were limited to the users who were compromised), the attack went further. The malicious software that was installed on users machines included remote access tools, which effectively "phone home" to the hacker and allow them to remotely control the computer they are installed on. From there they were able to explore the rest of the network, and exploit the DNC servers, which contained far more information than any single user's computer. This part of the attack, with an actual hacker in control, would be the "forcible" hacking part that you speak of.


If you want a more general example, I would say that actively trying to guess a person's email password is more "forcible", and that's the same kind of hack that happened to Sarah Palin. With Hillary Clinton's email server, there were actual vulnerabilities on the server itself, and since the server was exposed to the Internet, hackers could connect to it, exploit the vulnerability, and gain access that way.