> 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

> 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.