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The attribution of those hacks did not implicate Russia and especially did not implicate Putin. There may be other, secret evidence that does, but it was not r

The attribution of those hacks did not implicate Russia and especially did not implicate Putin. There may be other, secret evidence that does, but it was not revealed to the public for scrutiny. I think it goes without saying that Russia engages in mischief around the world in ways that hinder the US, and the US does the same to Russia. Nothing about this is a sudden, triggering event that calls for military strikes (as McCain has called them an "act of war"). The notable aspect of all this is not that it happened, but that it is being framed with the same "we must unseat Saddam immediately" urgency that we have seen before when warmongers try to manipulate our judgment. A lot of people risked their lives to end the cold war. I can think of few things more irresponsible than fanning the flames of a minor incident to the point where someone like McCain is calling for military retaliation (which he effectively did). It could be argued that a stronger bluff was needed against Russia over the Caucuses or Crimea, but that ship has sailed and the opportunity was lost. We can count on US hawks to try to turn any event into a trigger, but that doesn't mean it is a big deal or that it represents a threat to US national security.

lern_too_spel 10y ago
> The attribution of those hacks did not implicate Russia They absolutely did implicate Russia. Read them again. The rest of your post is bloviating about a military escalation that exists only in your mind.
- grandalf 10y ago
  > Read them again. I just read them again. There is clearly a great effort being made to embellish the evidence so that it seems like state actor caliber work. I think we can safely assume that the US and Russia conduct steady amounts of mischief toward each-other, and that it's largely out of the public view. Some of it likely includes hacking attempts, etc. But the very documents you link say that while the groups in question were not previously linked to the Russian government, there is suddenly reason to believe they are (namely the release of the DNC emails). So for some reason previous JARs had not felt it worthwhile to speculate about state actors being involved, suddenly this link to the Russian state became the most relevant aspect. Hmm. I think it's quite plausible that Russia pays several groups of hackers a few million dollars a year to conduct mischief. For all we know the US pays similar (or even the same) groups to do mischief. We're told that there is an arbitrary code execution vulnerability that was responsible for the DNC hack, but we're also told that a user fell victim to a phishing email. While both might be true, which of these pieces of evidence can we attribute to the DNC hack? It was revealed previously that the server at the DNC was not patched and was likely vulnerable for many months. Any number of actors could have gained access to it, installed rootkits, etc. With all the leaks and embarrassing revelations coming out about US intelligence agencies, I think it's best to remain highly skeptical of any information revealed that has a political impact. A few months ago people were angry that James Comey handed the election to Donald Trump, now the same people are certain that the best explanation for the DNC email leaks is a Russian state-sponsored attack. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Sure, Russia probably has a constant mischief campaign (as does, quite likely, the US), but within 24 hours of the DNC email leaks there were loud accusations of Russian involvement before Crowdstrike had done any analysis. Reading the actual emails reveals an organizational culture that was extremely technically inept and that did not take it security seriously at all. To put this in perspective, any serious state actor would have owned a vulnerable server being used by a major US political figure within hours after the server became vulnerable, and no trail would have been left. US intelligence warned the HRC about the vulnerable server multiple times because the US, a state actor, is on top of it. How difficult is it to periodically scan the list of a few hundred IP addresses used by top officials for known vulnerabilities. This is by far the most plausible explanation for how a state actor would handle the situation. If anything the FancyBear group and other similar groups are just hackers for hire who periodically sell some results to the Russian government. I think it's important to consider that if you have the budget of a state actor you don't do many of the things that are used as evidence in this narrative.
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    > I just read them again. There is clearly a great effort being made to embellish the evidence so that it seems like state actor caliber work. You very clearly didn't read them before this when you said there was no evidence other than that Russia might want to meddle in the election, and from your post, it seems unlikely you read them "again" just now. The hacks used implants that were only ever used by the respective groups, which had only targeted organizations that the Russian government was pursuing and were known to be RIS groups by multiple security firms long before the DNC attack even happened. The implants were dropped through spearphishing campaigns with forms hosted on known RIS infrastructure. > within 24 hours of the DNC email leaks there were loud accusations of Russian involvement before Crowdstrike had done any analysis The FBI had notified the DNC of the intrusion with attribution long before the emails were leaked to the public. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?src=twr&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/13/dnc-blew-off-fbi-hack-warnings.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hac... > US intelligence warned the HRC about the vulnerable server multiple times because the US, a state actor, is on top of it. HRC had nothing to do with the compromised DNC server, so US intelligence wouldn't have warned her and did not. Where are you getting this ridiculous assertion from?
    - grandalf 10y ago
      > The hacks used implants that were only ever used by the respective groups, which had only targeted organizations that the Russian government was pursuing and were known to be RIS groups So you're arguing that if you were state sponsored intelligence agency and you were using a crude technique that could be easily detected, that you'd only target organizations that your state had obvious strategic interest in? Your assertion fails a test of reasonableness for several reasons. The most obvious of which is that since there are thousands of Nigerians doing the same kind of phishing campaigns, so there would be no tactical reason not to include a large number of randomly generated email addresses or email addresses from other hacked lists. One obvious example is the Stratfor dump. Who were Stratfor's subscribers? Largely members of government agencies, large institutions, etc. Any hacking group would have had access to all of the emails in the dump, as well as other publicly available caches of email addresses. Also, if you were a state actor wishing to conduct a phishing campaign like the one we're discussing, why would you dispatch it from the Ukraine? Even the links you sent claim it's quite unusual for the sender address of a phishing email to be the same as the one registered to the domain, but this fact is not deemed worthy of consideration. So we're now down to three main possibilities: Either the state actor in question is extremely amateurish and careless, or it wasn't a state actor, or it was a state actor intending to lay a misleading trail. My point is simply that it's very presumptuous to jump to the conclusion that it was definitely a state actor and definitely Russia. The article you linked would perhaps be somewhat trustworthy if it were not the case that the NYT had a clear intent on helping HRC's candidacy and has been one of the chief supporters of propaganda about Russia. I consider the NYT to be America's own Pravda. The article contains assertions that are not accompanied by data. We're told that one of the DNC's computers was "phoning home" to "Russia" but there is sadly no reason to believe this or any of the other information in the article. I'd also add that due to the NYT's very poor adherence to journalistic best-practices and basic professionalism during the campaign, reading an article like that makes me doubt the truthfulness of the claims even more than I would have without reading it. While there are a few good reporters left at the NYT, the paper has a set of propaganda goals that often take precedence over truthful reporting and real journalism. This is deeply saddening to me, as I would hope that our nation would have at least one reputable large news organization. FWIW I'm horrified that Trump won the election, and did not expect him to, but I would also have been horrified (though less so) if HRC had won. We can do so much better.

lern_too_spel 10y ago

> The attribution of those hacks did not implicate Russia They absolutely did implicate Russia. Read them again. The rest of your post is bloviating about a military escalation that exists only in your mind.

grandalf 10y ago
> Read them again. I just read them again. There is clearly a great effort being made to embellish the evidence so that it seems like state actor caliber work. I think we can safely assume that the US and Russia conduct steady amounts of mischief toward each-other, and that it's largely out of the public view. Some of it likely includes hacking attempts, etc. But the very documents you link say that while the groups in question were not previously linked to the Russian government, there is suddenly reason to believe they are (namely the release of the DNC emails). So for some reason previous JARs had not felt it worthwhile to speculate about state actors being involved, suddenly this link to the Russian state became the most relevant aspect. Hmm. I think it's quite plausible that Russia pays several groups of hackers a few million dollars a year to conduct mischief. For all we know the US pays similar (or even the same) groups to do mischief. We're told that there is an arbitrary code execution vulnerability that was responsible for the DNC hack, but we're also told that a user fell victim to a phishing email. While both might be true, which of these pieces of evidence can we attribute to the DNC hack? It was revealed previously that the server at the DNC was not patched and was likely vulnerable for many months. Any number of actors could have gained access to it, installed rootkits, etc. With all the leaks and embarrassing revelations coming out about US intelligence agencies, I think it's best to remain highly skeptical of any information revealed that has a political impact. A few months ago people were angry that James Comey handed the election to Donald Trump, now the same people are certain that the best explanation for the DNC email leaks is a Russian state-sponsored attack. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Sure, Russia probably has a constant mischief campaign (as does, quite likely, the US), but within 24 hours of the DNC email leaks there were loud accusations of Russian involvement before Crowdstrike had done any analysis. Reading the actual emails reveals an organizational culture that was extremely technically inept and that did not take it security seriously at all. To put this in perspective, any serious state actor would have owned a vulnerable server being used by a major US political figure within hours after the server became vulnerable, and no trail would have been left. US intelligence warned the HRC about the vulnerable server multiple times because the US, a state actor, is on top of it. How difficult is it to periodically scan the list of a few hundred IP addresses used by top officials for known vulnerabilities. This is by far the most plausible explanation for how a state actor would handle the situation. If anything the FancyBear group and other similar groups are just hackers for hire who periodically sell some results to the Russian government. I think it's important to consider that if you have the budget of a state actor you don't do many of the things that are used as evidence in this narrative.
- lern_too_spel 10y ago
  > I just read them again. There is clearly a great effort being made to embellish the evidence so that it seems like state actor caliber work. You very clearly didn't read them before this when you said there was no evidence other than that Russia might want to meddle in the election, and from your post, it seems unlikely you read them "again" just now. The hacks used implants that were only ever used by the respective groups, which had only targeted organizations that the Russian government was pursuing and were known to be RIS groups by multiple security firms long before the DNC attack even happened. The implants were dropped through spearphishing campaigns with forms hosted on known RIS infrastructure. > within 24 hours of the DNC email leaks there were loud accusations of Russian involvement before Crowdstrike had done any analysis The FBI had notified the DNC of the intrusion with attribution long before the emails were leaked to the public. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?src=twr&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/13/dnc-blew-off-fbi-hack-warnings.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hac... > US intelligence warned the HRC about the vulnerable server multiple times because the US, a state actor, is on top of it. HRC had nothing to do with the compromised DNC server, so US intelligence wouldn't have warned her and did not. Where are you getting this ridiculous assertion from?
  - grandalf 10y ago
    > The hacks used implants that were only ever used by the respective groups, which had only targeted organizations that the Russian government was pursuing and were known to be RIS groups So you're arguing that if you were state sponsored intelligence agency and you were using a crude technique that could be easily detected, that you'd only target organizations that your state had obvious strategic interest in? Your assertion fails a test of reasonableness for several reasons. The most obvious of which is that since there are thousands of Nigerians doing the same kind of phishing campaigns, so there would be no tactical reason not to include a large number of randomly generated email addresses or email addresses from other hacked lists. One obvious example is the Stratfor dump. Who were Stratfor's subscribers? Largely members of government agencies, large institutions, etc. Any hacking group would have had access to all of the emails in the dump, as well as other publicly available caches of email addresses. Also, if you were a state actor wishing to conduct a phishing campaign like the one we're discussing, why would you dispatch it from the Ukraine? Even the links you sent claim it's quite unusual for the sender address of a phishing email to be the same as the one registered to the domain, but this fact is not deemed worthy of consideration. So we're now down to three main possibilities: Either the state actor in question is extremely amateurish and careless, or it wasn't a state actor, or it was a state actor intending to lay a misleading trail. My point is simply that it's very presumptuous to jump to the conclusion that it was definitely a state actor and definitely Russia. The article you linked would perhaps be somewhat trustworthy if it were not the case that the NYT had a clear intent on helping HRC's candidacy and has been one of the chief supporters of propaganda about Russia. I consider the NYT to be America's own Pravda. The article contains assertions that are not accompanied by data. We're told that one of the DNC's computers was "phoning home" to "Russia" but there is sadly no reason to believe this or any of the other information in the article. I'd also add that due to the NYT's very poor adherence to journalistic best-practices and basic professionalism during the campaign, reading an article like that makes me doubt the truthfulness of the claims even more than I would have without reading it. While there are a few good reporters left at the NYT, the paper has a set of propaganda goals that often take precedence over truthful reporting and real journalism. This is deeply saddening to me, as I would hope that our nation would have at least one reputable large news organization. FWIW I'm horrified that Trump won the election, and did not expect him to, but I would also have been horrified (though less so) if HRC had won. We can do so much better.