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Head of US intelligence gets owned by alleged teen

Head of US intelligence gets owned by alleged teen

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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The same "teen" hacker who allegedly broke into CIA director John Brennan’s personal email account is back at it again. Motherboard reports a hacker associated with the "Crackas With Attitude" group has now accessed accounts associated with James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence. This hacker reportedly gained control of Clapper’s personal email, home telephone and internet, and his wife’s Yahoo email. A spokesperson for Clapper confirmed the hack to Motherboard.

The hacker didn’t stop at just accessing email accounts. He also reportedly forwarded all calls to the director’s home phone to Paul Larudee, the co-founder of the Free Palestine Movement. A number reported to be either Clapper's cell phone or his wife Susan’s appeared to belong to the family when contacted. Although the hacker provided purported screenshots of Clapper’s email, they couldn’t be verified. This incident likely relied on social engineering techniques to guess Clapper’s passwords or security questions through web searches and research into his life.

Clapper is perhaps most well-known for his blatant lying to Congress in 2013 about the NSA's phone metadata collection. During a March hearing that year, a senator asked if "the NSA collected any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans." Clapper responded "No, sir." That statement was proven false with the release of Edward Snowden's document trove. The director later said he "simply didn't think of" the Patriot Act metadata section that allowed for the collection of those records.