Payback? Russia Gets Hacked, Revealing Putin Aide's Secrets (nbcnews.com)

Ukrainian activists have compromised 2,337 messages in the Microsoft Outlook accounts of two assistants to a top aide of Vladimir Putin. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes NBC News: A Ukrainian group calling itself Cyber Hunta has released more than a gigabyte of emails and other material from the office of one of Vladimir Putin's top aides, Vladislav Surkov, that show Russia's fingerprints all over the separatist movement in Ukraine. While the Kremlin has denied the relationship between Moscow and the separatists, the emails show in great detail how Russia controlled virtually every detail of the separatist effort in the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, which has torn the country apart and led to a Russian takeover of Crimea...

"This is a serious hack," said Maks Czuperski, head of the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, which has searched through the email dump and placed selected emails online. "We have seen so much happen to the United States, other countries at the hands of Russia," said Czuperski. "Not so much to Russia. It was only a question of time that some of the anonymous guys like Cyber Hunta would come to strike them back."
A senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that the U.S. "had no role" in the breach -- but when asked if the material was authentic, replied there was "nothing to indicate otherwise."

Comments

Re:Breaking news!

[smooth wombat]

Breaking news!

Vladislav Surkov has been found murdered in front of the Kremlin. At 12 noon. While giving a live interview on tv to state these emails are fake.

No witnesses have yet been found.

MH17

[manu0601]

Good article, except when it affirms who shot down MH17.

I know we heard various things on this, but I seriously doubt we can ever be certain about who shot down an aircraft over a region in civil war. The only valid interesting question here is why did we had commercial planes flying there at all?

Re:MH17

[Archtech]

Good article, except when it affirms who shot down MH17. I know we heard various things on this, but I seriously doubt we can ever be certain about who shot down an aircraft over a region in civil war.

A reasonable point. However, I have learned that when reading such articles you have to be extremely careful to notice exactly what is, and isn't said. The article mentions

"...the war in eastern Ukraine, which has taken the lives of 10,000 people, including the 298 passengers and crew of Malaysian Flight 17, shot down by a separatist missile in July 2014 over Ukraine".

There is no suggestion that any of the hacked emails mention MH17, so that part was just thrown in by NBC to spice up the copy a little. It was a tempting opportunity to insert some slimy innuendo, which many unsuspecting readers will accept as fact.

As we know, of course, there is no certainty even as to how MH17 was shot down. It may have been a SAM, or it may have been intercepted by a fighter - which would have to be Ukrainian. Even if it was shot down by a SAM, there is no certainty as to what type of SAM it was, to whom it belonged, or who fired it. There is some evidence that, if it was a BUK, it must have been fired from a Westerly direction, which would rule out the Novorossians.

Note also the way in which the 10,000 deaths just appear, without being attributed to any particular agency. The overwhelming majority of them were Donbass civilians deliberately killed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and their allies, the Nazi "battalions".

Re:Good!

[WindBourne]

the only bigger liars than Trump, are his followers, who continue to lie about everything.
Sad. There was a time that America was known for having morals. Now, our GOP has more in common with 3rd world nations, if not with 1930s Germany.

Re:nbc, carrying the capitalism

[Archtech]

this was the pretext similar to both the US wars in Iraq...

With the small difference that the USA invaded Iraq, whereas Russia did not invade Ukraine; and that the USA has (so far) killed about 3 million people in Iraq, whereas Russia has killed a negligible number of people (if, indeed, any) in Ukraine.

Then there's Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria... definitely clicking up the millions of deaths there.