That it was probably an inside job, possibly connected to the Kremlin and Putin, but it's hard to say. What I can say is that Western media has never understood the operations of the Russian government. There are multiple factions inside the Russian government. While almost all are loyal to the Kremlin, the interactions between these agencies sometimes runs amok, and they do things Putin does not condone or support, in their quest to gain power and influence. Sometimes this results in an internal struggle.
Obama Under "Intense Pressure" To Release Evidence Proving Russians Hacked The Election
- Thread starter Tsing Tao
- Start date
That it was probably an inside job, possibly connected to the Kremlin and Putin, but it's hard to say. What I can say is that Western media has never understood the operations of the Russian government. There are multiple factions inside the Russian government. While almost all are loyal to the Kremlin, the interactions between these agencies sometimes runs amok, and they do things Putin does not condone or support, in their quest to gain power and influence. Sometimes this results in an internal struggle.
Actually, the Clinton foundation took money directly from the Russian government. But you won't hear Freddie talk about that.
White House fails to make case that Russian hackers tampered with election
Talk about disappointments. The US government's much-anticipated analysis of Russian-sponsored hacking operations provides almost none of the promised evidence linking them to breaches that the Obama administration claims were orchestrated in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
The 13-page report, which was jointly published Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, billed itself as an indictment of sorts that would finally lay out the intelligence community's case that Russian government operatives carried out hacks on the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Clinton Campaign Chief John Podesta and leaked much of the resulting material. While security companies in the private sector have said for months the hacking campaign was the work of people working for the Russian government, anonymous people tied to the leaks have claimed they are lone wolves. Many independent security experts said there was little way to know the true origins of the attacks.
Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups.
"This ultimately seems like a very rushed report put together by multiple teams working different data sets and motivations," Robert M. Lee, CEO and Founder of the security company Dragos, wrote in a critique published Friday. "It is my opinion and speculation that there were some really good government analysts and operators contributing to this data and then report reviews, leadership approval processes, and sanitation processes stripped out most of the value and left behind a very confusing report trying to cover too much while saying too little."
The sloppiness, Lee noted, included the report's conflation of Russian hacking groups APT28 and APT29—also known as CozyBear, Sandworm, Sednit, and Sofacy, among others—with malware names such as BlackEnergy and Havex, and even hacking capabilities such as "Powershell Backdoor." The mix up of such basic classifications does little to inspire confidence that the report was carefully or methodically prepared. And that only sows more reasons for President elect Donald Trump and his supporters to cast doubt on the intelligence community's analysis on a matter that, if true, poses a major national security threat.
The writers showed a similar lack of rigor when publishing so-called indicators of compromise, which security practitioners use to detect if a network has been breached by a specific group or piece of malware. As Errata Security CEO Rob Graham pointed out in a blog post, one of the signatures detects the presence of "PAS TOOL WEB KIT," a tool that's widely used by literally hundreds, and possibly thousands, of hackers in Russia and Ukraine, most of whom are otherwise unaffiliated and have no connection to the Russian government.
"In other words, these rules can be a reflection of the fact the government has excellent information for attribution," Graham wrote. "Or, it could be a reflection that they've got only weak bits and pieces. It's impossible for us outsiders to tell."
"Both foolish and baseless"
Security consultant Jeffrey Carr also cast doubt on claims that attacks that hit the Democratic National Committee could only have originated from Russian-sponsored hackers because they relied on the same malware that also breached Germany's Bundestag and French TV network TV5Monde. Proponents of this theory, including the CrowdStrike researchers who analyzed the Democratic National Committee's hacked network, argue that the pattern strongly implicates Russia because no other actor would have the combined motivation and resources to hack the same targets. But as Carr pointed out, the full source code for the X-Agent implant that has long been associated with APT28 was independently obtained by researchers from antivirus provider Eset.
"If ESET could do it, so can others," Carr wrote. "It is both foolish and baseless to claim, as CrowdStrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the Russian government when the source code is there for anyone to find and use at will."
The doubts raised by Lee, Graham, and Carr underscore the difficulty members of the US intelligence community face when taking findings out of the highly secretive channels they normally populate and putting them into the public domain. Indeed, the Joint Analysis Report makes no mention of the Democratic party or even the Democratic National Committee. The lack of specifics and vagueness about exactly how the DHS and FBI have determined Russian involvement in the hacks leaves the report sounding more like innuendo than a carefully crafted indictment.
The intelligence community has found itself in this position before, including in attributing a highly destructive attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014 to North Korea. In fairness, the reticence in both cases is likely justified by the interest in protecting sources and methods used to detect such attacks. And as Lee was quick to note, strong technical evidence is likely to be included in reports to Congress that later may be declassified. Still, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Thursday's Joint Analysis Report provides almost no new evidence to support the Obama Administration's claims Russia attempted to interfere with the US electoral process. Absent something more, the increasingly bitter debate may rage on indefinitely.
http://arstechnica.com/security/201...016-election-bitter-debate-likely-to-rage-on/
Talk about disappointments. The US government's much-anticipated analysis of Russian-sponsored hacking operations provides almost none of the promised evidence linking them to breaches that the Obama administration claims were orchestrated in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
The 13-page report, which was jointly published Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, billed itself as an indictment of sorts that would finally lay out the intelligence community's case that Russian government operatives carried out hacks on the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Clinton Campaign Chief John Podesta and leaked much of the resulting material. While security companies in the private sector have said for months the hacking campaign was the work of people working for the Russian government, anonymous people tied to the leaks have claimed they are lone wolves. Many independent security experts said there was little way to know the true origins of the attacks.
Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups.
"This ultimately seems like a very rushed report put together by multiple teams working different data sets and motivations," Robert M. Lee, CEO and Founder of the security company Dragos, wrote in a critique published Friday. "It is my opinion and speculation that there were some really good government analysts and operators contributing to this data and then report reviews, leadership approval processes, and sanitation processes stripped out most of the value and left behind a very confusing report trying to cover too much while saying too little."
The sloppiness, Lee noted, included the report's conflation of Russian hacking groups APT28 and APT29—also known as CozyBear, Sandworm, Sednit, and Sofacy, among others—with malware names such as BlackEnergy and Havex, and even hacking capabilities such as "Powershell Backdoor." The mix up of such basic classifications does little to inspire confidence that the report was carefully or methodically prepared. And that only sows more reasons for President elect Donald Trump and his supporters to cast doubt on the intelligence community's analysis on a matter that, if true, poses a major national security threat.
The writers showed a similar lack of rigor when publishing so-called indicators of compromise, which security practitioners use to detect if a network has been breached by a specific group or piece of malware. As Errata Security CEO Rob Graham pointed out in a blog post, one of the signatures detects the presence of "PAS TOOL WEB KIT," a tool that's widely used by literally hundreds, and possibly thousands, of hackers in Russia and Ukraine, most of whom are otherwise unaffiliated and have no connection to the Russian government.
"In other words, these rules can be a reflection of the fact the government has excellent information for attribution," Graham wrote. "Or, it could be a reflection that they've got only weak bits and pieces. It's impossible for us outsiders to tell."
"Both foolish and baseless"
Security consultant Jeffrey Carr also cast doubt on claims that attacks that hit the Democratic National Committee could only have originated from Russian-sponsored hackers because they relied on the same malware that also breached Germany's Bundestag and French TV network TV5Monde. Proponents of this theory, including the CrowdStrike researchers who analyzed the Democratic National Committee's hacked network, argue that the pattern strongly implicates Russia because no other actor would have the combined motivation and resources to hack the same targets. But as Carr pointed out, the full source code for the X-Agent implant that has long been associated with APT28 was independently obtained by researchers from antivirus provider Eset.
"If ESET could do it, so can others," Carr wrote. "It is both foolish and baseless to claim, as CrowdStrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the Russian government when the source code is there for anyone to find and use at will."
The doubts raised by Lee, Graham, and Carr underscore the difficulty members of the US intelligence community face when taking findings out of the highly secretive channels they normally populate and putting them into the public domain. Indeed, the Joint Analysis Report makes no mention of the Democratic party or even the Democratic National Committee. The lack of specifics and vagueness about exactly how the DHS and FBI have determined Russian involvement in the hacks leaves the report sounding more like innuendo than a carefully crafted indictment.
The intelligence community has found itself in this position before, including in attributing a highly destructive attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014 to North Korea. In fairness, the reticence in both cases is likely justified by the interest in protecting sources and methods used to detect such attacks. And as Lee was quick to note, strong technical evidence is likely to be included in reports to Congress that later may be declassified. Still, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Thursday's Joint Analysis Report provides almost no new evidence to support the Obama Administration's claims Russia attempted to interfere with the US electoral process. Absent something more, the increasingly bitter debate may rage on indefinitely.
http://arstechnica.com/security/201...016-election-bitter-debate-likely-to-rage-on/
We must focus on the Russians. Otherwise they have to explain the corrupt collusion between the Clintons, the DNC and the media to rig an election. What tragic ironey that a corrupt Russian government exposes our own corrupt process in the DNC.
No, Russia didn't hack Vermont's power grid
http://boingboing.net/2016/12/31/no-russia-didnt-hack-vermon.html?fk_bb
Despite what you might have read in this alarming story in the Washington Post, Russia did not hack Vermont's power authority.
Here's what really happened: in the aftermath of the US government's statements about Russian state-implicated hacking of the US election, government departments across the country audited their systems, looking for instances of the malware that was implicated in the DNC hack. One laptop at the Vermont utility -- not connected to the grid -- was found to have been infected by this malware, which is available for purchase by anyone through the criminal, underground marketplaces for hacking tools.
There's a lot of room between "Russia pwned Vermont's power-grid" and "a single computer was compromised by Russian-made malware that anyone can buy and use."
THIS MATTERS not only because one of the nation’s major newspaper once again published a wildly misleading, fear-mongering story about Russia. It matters even more because it reflects the deeply irrational and ever-spiraling fever that is being cultivated in U.S. political discourse and culture about the threat posed by Moscow.
The Post has many excellent reporters and smart editors. They have produce many great stories this year. But this kind of blatantly irresponsible and sensationalist tabloid behavior – which tracks what they did when promoting that grotesque PropOrNot blacklist of U.S. news outlets accused of being Kremlin tools – is a by-product of the Anything Goes mentality that now shapes mainstream discussion of Russia, Putin and the Grave Threat to All Things Decent in America that they pose.
The level of group-think, fear-mongering, coercive peer-pressure, and über-nationalism has not been seen since the halcyon days of 2002 and 2003. Indeed, the very same people who back then smeared anyone questioning official claims as Saddam sympathizers or stooges and left-wing un-American loons are back for their sequel, accusing anyone who expresses any skepticism toward claims about Russia of being Putin sympathizers and Kremlin operatives and stooges.
http://boingboing.net/2016/12/31/no-russia-didnt-hack-vermon.html?fk_bb
Despite what you might have read in this alarming story in the Washington Post, Russia did not hack Vermont's power authority.
Here's what really happened: in the aftermath of the US government's statements about Russian state-implicated hacking of the US election, government departments across the country audited their systems, looking for instances of the malware that was implicated in the DNC hack. One laptop at the Vermont utility -- not connected to the grid -- was found to have been infected by this malware, which is available for purchase by anyone through the criminal, underground marketplaces for hacking tools.
There's a lot of room between "Russia pwned Vermont's power-grid" and "a single computer was compromised by Russian-made malware that anyone can buy and use."
THIS MATTERS not only because one of the nation’s major newspaper once again published a wildly misleading, fear-mongering story about Russia. It matters even more because it reflects the deeply irrational and ever-spiraling fever that is being cultivated in U.S. political discourse and culture about the threat posed by Moscow.
The Post has many excellent reporters and smart editors. They have produce many great stories this year. But this kind of blatantly irresponsible and sensationalist tabloid behavior – which tracks what they did when promoting that grotesque PropOrNot blacklist of U.S. news outlets accused of being Kremlin tools – is a by-product of the Anything Goes mentality that now shapes mainstream discussion of Russia, Putin and the Grave Threat to All Things Decent in America that they pose.
The level of group-think, fear-mongering, coercive peer-pressure, and über-nationalism has not been seen since the halcyon days of 2002 and 2003. Indeed, the very same people who back then smeared anyone questioning official claims as Saddam sympathizers or stooges and left-wing un-American loons are back for their sequel, accusing anyone who expresses any skepticism toward claims about Russia of being Putin sympathizers and Kremlin operatives and stooges.
Why are leftist morons and establishment Republicans attempting to start a war with Putin.
If Putin did not seem calm and rational... I would be worried.
I am not saying I trust Putin's long term goals.
I am saying our side seem to be trying to provoke him in the short run and its stupid and dangerous.
Putin seems to be playing chess and Obama and McCain and Graham and Ryan and maybe McConnell are losing at checkers.
We are now making our FBI and CIA and look stupid for political reasons. Our press is a bunch of clowns.
What the hell is wrong with children.
If Putin did not seem calm and rational... I would be worried.
I am not saying I trust Putin's long term goals.
I am saying our side seem to be trying to provoke him in the short run and its stupid and dangerous.
Putin seems to be playing chess and Obama and McCain and Graham and Ryan and maybe McConnell are losing at checkers.
We are now making our FBI and CIA and look stupid for political reasons. Our press is a bunch of clowns.
What the hell is wrong with children.
You miss the point. Trump has ties to Russian money. But you don't know where it either begins or ends. Putin is considered by some to be the richest man in the world because his finger is pretty much in every pie.
http://www.businessinsider.com/form...son-in-the-world-until-he-leaves-power-2015-7
So you really don't know how much or how little Trump is tied to Putin or his surrogates, especially since Trump has been the least transparent presidential candidate in decades with respect to his financials.
As for the hacking stuff, your being a stifling pedant with blinders really does not further your cause. It just shows you for what you are.
It was for charity. The foundation not beholden to anyone. Any money Trump received was not charitable. You are being obtuse.