He should become immune to social engineering and manipulation... /s
Now seriously, there is not much he can do going forward other than be even more careful with vetting his sources. Which I am sure he already internalized.
(Questions about the current state of journalism aside...)
There is already standard journalistic practice for avoiding this: get a second, more reliable source. It can often be much easier to get a reliable source to verify information initially provided by a sketchy source than to get that reliable source to provide information in the first place.
If you post unverified information that one person on the internet tells you, your work is indistinguishable from gossip, and should be taken as such.
His entire beat is based on untrustworthy sources. What makes him special is that he is hanging out on Russian language carder forums and the like, monitoring the gossip and identifying new threats and patterns of behavior. That is the value that he adds, and it's a reasonably big value.
In this case, he got played, but if he stops trying to work with untrustworthy sources he stops doing his job.
>What makes him special is that he is hanging out on Russian language carder forums and the like, monitoring the gossip and identifying new threats and patterns of behavior. That is the value that he adds, and it's a reasonably big value.
That's also not what he did in the case from my understanding . The person contacted him. He didn't verify it from secondary sources on the underground, or get access to proof the the hack. I think people trust him because he usually is able to provide some verification, but failed to do so in this case.
There should have been a "going forward I will..." segment.