How to Report on a Hack Without Becoming a Puppet

Max Hoppenstedt, Thomas Rid, Joseph Cox Russia’s likely
interference in the US election; the hacking of extramarital
affairs site Ashley Madison; a huge dump of internal documents and
emails from Italian surveillance company Hacking Team. The list of
prominent data breaches carried out by pseudonymous groups is long
and ever growing. But there is another story that sits in between
the hacks themselves, and the articles that you read: how
journalists verify and attribute data breaches, and decide what to
publish, and what to redact. In this panel we will explain how this
delicate process, which is rarely seen by the public, plays out:
what happens when a hacker approaches a journalist, how journalists
verify hacked data, how much do a hacker’s motivations influence a
story, and how can journalists link a hack to a particular actor
when attribution can be difficult? This job becomes even more
important, and potentially complicated, when dealing with stories
of massive political significance, like the recent, and likely
Russian-driven, campaign around the US election. And as
commentators expect more activity around French and potentially
German elections, reporting any future incidents as ethically and
responsibly as possible has a renewed sense of urgency. Never
before has hacking held such a political weight; governments,
societies, and the press need to lay down the groundwork for
dealing with the fallout of serious data breaches.