Slashdot Mirror
Computer Scientists Believe a Trump Server Was Communicating With a Russian Bank (slate.com)
In light of the Democratic National Committee hack by the Russians earlier this year, a "tightly knit community of computer scientists" working in a variety of fields came up with the hypothesis, "which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump's many servers." In late July, one of the scientists who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves discovered possible malware emanating from Russia, with the destination domain having Trump in its name. What the researcher saw "was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue": Slate Magazine reports: More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server's DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues. The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn't the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation -- conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn't an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. The server was first registered to Trump's business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. That wasn't the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. A small portion of the logs showed communication with a server belonging to Michigan-based Spectrum Health.
I have customers with nearly-abandoned dedicated servers on their own IPs and with some project-related whitelist rules that act very much like what's described in the summary. Those servers do things like wasting their time checking for updates from some custom module authors (some overseas), and some try to connect to long-gone services that have had their domains scooped up by (ready?) Russian typo-squatters and the like, but with IPs that resolve somewhere else entirely because they've been re-assigned to entirely different companies. And no, nobody dares to approve changing the configuration on these legacy servers ... and they keep paying to keep them online, despite the crickets chirping instead of activity on whatever legacy task they once did.
There are all sorts of reasons this sort of behavior might materialize. You know, sort of like there might be all sorts of reasons that Huma Abedin's trove of email - in the hundreds of thousands - might bey on her creepy, estranged husband's laptop. I'm sorry, did I use her name? Woopsie! Hillary Clinton now calls her "a staffer."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
FTA: "Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence." Oh, you mean like the SSH setup I have for all my servers to only listen to known IPs for shell access? Uh, yeah, no kidding. Geez, politics can make people so stupid.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
It's been part of their modus operandi from day one. Whenever they're caught lying or committing crimes, they try to deflect the blame to someone else or change the topic into an attack on Trump or their accusers. The Russia boogeyman is a favorite for them.
It's so tired by now, and they've been caught lying so many times (pretty much every time they open their mouths, they're lying) that nobody believes a thing they say. The DNC could say the sun rose this morning and I'd still check out my window to verify.
You guys nominated someone under criminal investigation by the FBI. The only people on earth who can't talk about how shitty Trump is are Clinton supporters.
The evidence we're given is this:
"What the researcher saw "was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue": "
A ping is an ICMP echo request. They can have data, but it's the same both ways and it's generally nothing meaningful. I get random pings and crap from everywhere, including Russia, China, etc. along with port scans and everything else. Frankly this is utter BS without more evidence than a random server responding to some pings and not others.
It's also not clear how they were able to spy on this traffic without working at an ISP (where spying on your customers is generally frowned upon). But if they were in the middle of this, they could simply have inserted their own pings by spoofing the source address of some traffic. The article was a sad waste of time. There are lots of allegations that are based on nothing at all.
You have to be totally insane to think Russians possibly having malware in some bank that tried to protect itself to begin with, is anything even CLOSE to the seriousness of the Secretary of State ignoring multiple warnings about how insecure a personal email server was when inevitably she'd be sending top secret material over email...
Hillary brought all of her ills on herself and the blowback from it is not yet a hundredth of what it should be. Every single person who knows anything about computer security should be utterly ashamed at ever supporting her actions, and the fact that so many still support her makes me think there is no real hope ever for comprehensive computer security. The system is rotten to the core, many computer "professionals" willing to compromise a systems integrity at the drop of a hat.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A rich white New Yorker is the oligarchy.
You're right that they talk about DNS queries, but I'm pretty sure this is an actual ICMP echo:
It can also be pretty easily explained by having a bunch of normal people on PCs behind a corporate firewall that doesn't accept traffic. Which makes sense because when they talk to the people, we find this:
So, I'm still saying this looks like BS to me. Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible that some Russian hacked something somewhere. I just don't buy there being a story here without more evidence than a few stray DNS queries.
There's no real evidence of Hillary's lies,
You don't think Congressional testimony counts as evidence?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.