Sharyl Attkisson Says Obama Hackers Attacked Her Computer To Delete Benghazi Info — Really?
Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS News reporter who quite her job in March claiming that the network was too liberal and refused to cover such alleged Obama administration “scandals” as the Benghazi tragedy, posted a video online Friday which she says proves that hackers staged a cyber-attack on her personal computer, deleting sensitive information about the Benghazi attack.
The video, which can be seen above, created an immediate sensation in the conservative media, with the Glenn Beck-backed site The Blaze describing it as “creepy” and Fox News calling the video “chilling stuff.”
Attkisson says she was informed by a high-level source identified only as “Number One” that the cyber attack came from inside the Obama administration itself, and was carried out with super-secret, sophisticated software used only by government spies.
“According to Attkisson, ‘Number One’ called the Obama hacking operation ‘worse than anything Nixon ever did’ and identified the likely culprits as ‘either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the National Security Agency.'”
But analysis of the video by computer security experts revealed that the more likely perpetrator was a “delete” key that got stuck.
And one viewer of the “computer hacking” video noted that the video itself was apparently shot much later than Attkisson claims the cyber attack took place — judging by a TV broadcast clearly visible in the background of the video, of a show that did not air until almost a year after the alleged hacking in October 2012.
The video of Attkisson’s computer allegedly suffering a bizarre cyber-attack can be viewed above.
“Attkisson shot this video on or sometime after September 16, 2013. The episode of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ that is playing in the background features Valerie Harper dancing a Foxtrot to ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’ and first aired live on the evening of that date,” a viewer who commented on the site Media Matters noted. “According to Attkisson’s own timeline her computer was ‘hacked’ in October 2012, she came forward with this allegation in May 2013, but then waited until September 2013 to take video ‘evidence.'”
As for the sudden, and blatant erasing of Attkisson’s Benghazi-related text visible in the video, Brad Moore of the computer security firm Interhack says that it certainly does not show evidence of an external cyber-attack.
“There are multiple explanations and we were able to demonstrate quickly and easily one possible, the backspace key,” he said, explaining that in word processing programs such as Microsoft Word, a delete key that gets stuck due to a piece of dirt or debris caught in the keyboard will simply delete everything until the user figures out the problem and cleans the keyboard.
The blog Crooks and Liars also wondered why, if Sharyl Attkisson truly believed that the Obama administration was ordering her computer hacked, she simply left the computer connected to the internet for the entire time she wrote a book that, she claims, contains damaging information abut the administration — the same information the administration was allegedly attempting to delete with the supposed cyber attack.
