8 ms·

As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise intrigue

29 points by jboydyhacker 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
alexmingoia 10y ago
There's zero proof of this assertion in the article... But hey whatever deflects blame and attention from the corruption in the DNC.
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  I don't think that they are deflecting anything.
  - Natsu 10y ago
    Coulda fooled me. It gives people something else to talk about, rather than discussing how the DNC made sure that Hillary won, no matter what the primary voters thought...
- daxorid 10y ago
  Many people in infosec (epitomized by the Swift On Security account) normally circumspect and cautious about attribution, are claiming with 100% certainty that Putin is behind the leaks. Politics have a tendency to really mess with a person's nominal judgement.
  - Teever 10y ago
    Do you have any evidence of this? I don't understand why the Russians would be capable of obtaining this data yet not able to release it without revealing that they were the source. Unless it was their motivation to be linked to it -- but what does that gain them? It seems like the more likely story is that all of this talk about the Russians is just a method of misdirecting people to discuss the theoretical Russian link but not the documents themselves.
    - daxorid 10y ago
      You may have misunderstood me. I am saying that while attribution is a very tricky, difficult business fraught with guesswork and spectra of probabilities, in this one instance a ton of infosec people are throwing their typical caution about attribution out the window to claim full confidence in attribution to Putin on the basis of a shared IP address in France and a Romanian who says Guccifer2 doesn't write like a Romanian. It is a great demonstration of what politics does to the minds of nominally cautious, reasonable people.
      - Teever 10y ago
        Thanks for the clarification. That makes a lot more sense.
  - riffic 10y ago
    Still have no proof other than a spurious claim "Many people in infosec..."
    - chillwaves 10y ago
      OP is likely just Correcting the Record.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  There's zero proof of this assertion in the article Yeah, the only thing missing in that totally unsubstantiated article was Hillary saying directly that Putin and Russia are now part of a "vast right wing conspiracy" trying to keep her from returning to the White House.
rrggrr 10y ago
Irrelevant if true. A Trump, Clinton or Johnson administration cannot reverse trends in the middle east that threaten Russia's southwest border. Russian energy fortunes will not improve as pressure from alternative energy and shale/sands sources is irreversible. Global deflation across most commodities will continue to sap income from Russia's natural resources, at least until China can somehow rebalance its economy. I believe all of this is apparent to Russia, and that like other governments they well understand that global stability is essential to their economic prosperity and domestic order. If Russia must involve itself in US Politics in some manner, they would do well to get behind whichever candidate can contribute to global stability. Even if it means a return to 1990's US hegemony - a time that was very good for many Russia.
rimutrees 10y ago
Well thats one way to spin it
jonnybgood 10y ago
The title is inaccurate. According to the article, researchers made the link, not any counterintelligence organization.
- dang 10y ago
  We changed the submitted title ("Counterintelligence Links Russian GRU to DNC Leak and Putin") to the current article title and threw in an "allegations" for good measure.
gtrubetskoy 10y ago
From NYT I'd expect something better than "Evidence so far suggests" with zero evidence presented. Anyone who's done anything related to security knows that it's impossible to discern much from any trace of an attack left behind - at best you might have IPs of proxy servers they used and you might be able to figure out the vulnerability exploited, but if the attackers were any good (and they're saying "evidence" suggests it's government agency level type stuff) - there is no chance they'd leave anything behind other than false traces to confuse the investigation. Real evidence would be a corroborated confession, but even an excerpt of logs and/or a little description of what happened other than the "Cozy Bear" story would be great. So basically someone hacks the DNC servers (and my guess would be that it should be trivial given that this is primarily a volunteer-operated organization), and NYT blames it on GRU. Because being hacked by Russia is cool, compared to being hacked by a nobody because your security is sloppy. BTW - crowdstrike.com was registered in 2010 with GoDaddy, not exactly trust inspiring.
- wtf_is_up 10y ago
  The Russian connection was just a deflection tactic to link Trump to Russia. There's no real evidence besides: * Wikileaks leaked right before the DNC * This makes Hillary's campaign look bad * If it's bad for her, it's good for Trump * Assange works for Russia * Russia wants Trump to win Trump has been accused of painting a 'dark picture' of America, but invoking the Red Scare is a whole other level of fear mongering.
  - tsukikage 10y ago
    "Assange works for Russia"? This is just something we assume everyone accepts now? When did that happen? Last I heard, Assange worked for no-one but his own ego...
    - Lordarminius 10y ago
      Last I heard, Assange worked for no-one but his own ego... Really I am disappointed. I'm not even American but I would think that you would respect a man who has taken a bold stand against tyranny. This is how you regard him? In your estimation Snowden is an egotistical too?
OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
I think we all know that NYTimes is in bed with the Clinton campaign
zarriak 10y ago
The one thing that annoys me most about this isn't about who is doing the hacking, but how horribly the DNC had failed at security. Nobody has been talking about this and I find it annoying to see nobody has been focusing on greater security.
- meshko 10y ago
  What makes you think they failed terribly? We haven't seen full analysis (or much of anything yet), but there are mentions of potentially specially targeted malware. Very few organizations will withhold a direct targeted attack by a government which possesses zero days and resources to hand craft attack software and can find personal information of specific people attacked.
rdtsc 10y ago
I don't buy it. This is a typical tactic -- "Oh look we were hacked by ex-Soviet supervillains, nobody could have resisted this attack." When we got what looks like a FAQ blog post from Guccifer 2.0 ( https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/faq/ https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/faq/ ) and I tried to guess some things about him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009544 Here is what I came up with: "...there is a high chance he is from Moldova, and now works for one of the big IT companies. Probably in his mid 30s. Lives in US or Canada."
- Gustomaximus 10y ago
  > Cares and knows about DNC and specific candidates. Guessing they are following the election process, so probably live in US or Canada. For this you underestimate the global interest in the US elections. It is so influential on the rest of world many take keen interest. This can easily be lunch-break talk in Australia. Not sure about the other points.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    Well maybe it was just guessing based on my experience. At least in Easter Europe with friends I talked, aside from generalities about candidates (Trump is building a wall, ha-ha), it nobody worries or cares deeply enough to follow it to the level of DNC, to watch for election fraud, corruption.
oh_sigh 10y ago
Okay...let's take all this at face value, even though there is absolutely no evidence for a hack whatsoever. Russia is showing the American people how rigged (at least) one of their major political parties is. So...we should feel sorry for the party that rigged their own supposed open choice of candidates? Hell, let's take it one step further. Imagine the Russian political world actually wants Trump to win. Is that the end of the world? Does it necessarily mean it is something bad for the USA, and good for Russia? What if it meant it would something good for Russia, and good for the USA? Didn't like half the world want Obama to win in 2008?

29 points by jboydyhacker 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

There's zero proof of this assertion in the article... But hey whatever deflects blame and attention from the corruption in the DNC.

adamnemecek 10y ago
I don't think that they are deflecting anything.
- Natsu 10y ago
  Coulda fooled me. It gives people something else to talk about, rather than discussing how the DNC made sure that Hillary won, no matter what the primary voters thought...
daxorid 10y ago
Many people in infosec (epitomized by the Swift On Security account) normally circumspect and cautious about attribution, are claiming with 100% certainty that Putin is behind the leaks. Politics have a tendency to really mess with a person's nominal judgement.
- Teever 10y ago
  Do you have any evidence of this? I don't understand why the Russians would be capable of obtaining this data yet not able to release it without revealing that they were the source. Unless it was their motivation to be linked to it -- but what does that gain them? It seems like the more likely story is that all of this talk about the Russians is just a method of misdirecting people to discuss the theoretical Russian link but not the documents themselves.
  - daxorid 10y ago
    You may have misunderstood me. I am saying that while attribution is a very tricky, difficult business fraught with guesswork and spectra of probabilities, in this one instance a ton of infosec people are throwing their typical caution about attribution out the window to claim full confidence in attribution to Putin on the basis of a shared IP address in France and a Romanian who says Guccifer2 doesn't write like a Romanian. It is a great demonstration of what politics does to the minds of nominally cautious, reasonable people.
    - Teever 10y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. That makes a lot more sense.
- riffic 10y ago
  Still have no proof other than a spurious claim "Many people in infosec..."
  - chillwaves 10y ago
    OP is likely just Correcting the Record.
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
There's zero proof of this assertion in the article Yeah, the only thing missing in that totally unsubstantiated article was Hillary saying directly that Putin and Russia are now part of a "vast right wing conspiracy" trying to keep her from returning to the White House.

rrggrr 10y ago

Irrelevant if true. A Trump, Clinton or Johnson administration cannot reverse trends in the middle east that threaten Russia's southwest border. Russian energy fortunes will not improve as pressure from alternative energy and shale/sands sources is irreversible. Global deflation across most commodities will continue to sap income from Russia's natural resources, at least until China can somehow rebalance its economy. I believe all of this is apparent to Russia, and that like other governments they well understand that global stability is essential to their economic prosperity and domestic order. If Russia must involve itself in US Politics in some manner, they would do well to get behind whichever candidate can contribute to global stability. Even if it means a return to 1990's US hegemony - a time that was very good for many Russia.

rimutrees 10y ago

Well thats one way to spin it

jonnybgood 10y ago

The title is inaccurate. According to the article, researchers made the link, not any counterintelligence organization.

dang 10y ago
We changed the submitted title ("Counterintelligence Links Russian GRU to DNC Leak and Putin") to the current article title and threw in an "allegations" for good measure.

gtrubetskoy 10y ago

From NYT I'd expect something better than "Evidence so far suggests" with zero evidence presented. Anyone who's done anything related to security knows that it's impossible to discern much from any trace of an attack left behind - at best you might have IPs of proxy servers they used and you might be able to figure out the vulnerability exploited, but if the attackers were any good (and they're saying "evidence" suggests it's government agency level type stuff) - there is no chance they'd leave anything behind other than false traces to confuse the investigation. Real evidence would be a corroborated confession, but even an excerpt of logs and/or a little description of what happened other than the "Cozy Bear" story would be great. So basically someone hacks the DNC servers (and my guess would be that it should be trivial given that this is primarily a volunteer-operated organization), and NYT blames it on GRU. Because being hacked by Russia is cool, compared to being hacked by a nobody because your security is sloppy. BTW - crowdstrike.com was registered in 2010 with GoDaddy, not exactly trust inspiring.

wtf_is_up 10y ago
The Russian connection was just a deflection tactic to link Trump to Russia. There's no real evidence besides: * Wikileaks leaked right before the DNC * This makes Hillary's campaign look bad * If it's bad for her, it's good for Trump * Assange works for Russia * Russia wants Trump to win Trump has been accused of painting a 'dark picture' of America, but invoking the Red Scare is a whole other level of fear mongering.
- tsukikage 10y ago
  "Assange works for Russia"? This is just something we assume everyone accepts now? When did that happen? Last I heard, Assange worked for no-one but his own ego...
  - Lordarminius 10y ago
    Last I heard, Assange worked for no-one but his own ego... Really I am disappointed. I'm not even American but I would think that you would respect a man who has taken a bold stand against tyranny. This is how you regard him? In your estimation Snowden is an egotistical too?

OneNoteIsFree 10y ago

I think we all know that NYTimes is in bed with the Clinton campaign

zarriak 10y ago

The one thing that annoys me most about this isn't about who is doing the hacking, but how horribly the DNC had failed at security. Nobody has been talking about this and I find it annoying to see nobody has been focusing on greater security.

meshko 10y ago
What makes you think they failed terribly? We haven't seen full analysis (or much of anything yet), but there are mentions of potentially specially targeted malware. Very few organizations will withhold a direct targeted attack by a government which possesses zero days and resources to hand craft attack software and can find personal information of specific people attacked.

rdtsc 10y ago

I don't buy it. This is a typical tactic -- "Oh look we were hacked by ex-Soviet supervillains, nobody could have resisted this attack." When we got what looks like a FAQ blog post from Guccifer 2.0 ( https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/faq/ https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/faq/ ) and I tried to guess some things about him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009544 Here is what I came up with: "...there is a high chance he is from Moldova, and now works for one of the big IT companies. Probably in his mid 30s. Lives in US or Canada."

Gustomaximus 10y ago
> Cares and knows about DNC and specific candidates. Guessing they are following the election process, so probably live in US or Canada. For this you underestimate the global interest in the US elections. It is so influential on the rest of world many take keen interest. This can easily be lunch-break talk in Australia. Not sure about the other points.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  Well maybe it was just guessing based on my experience. At least in Easter Europe with friends I talked, aside from generalities about candidates (Trump is building a wall, ha-ha), it nobody worries or cares deeply enough to follow it to the level of DNC, to watch for election fraud, corruption.

oh_sigh 10y ago

Okay...let's take all this at face value, even though there is absolutely no evidence for a hack whatsoever. Russia is showing the American people how rigged (at least) one of their major political parties is. So...we should feel sorry for the party that rigged their own supposed open choice of candidates? Hell, let's take it one step further. Imagine the Russian political world actually wants Trump to win. Is that the end of the world? Does it necessarily mean it is something bad for the USA, and good for Russia? What if it meant it would something good for Russia, and good for the USA? Didn't like half the world want Obama to win in 2008?