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FBI and Homeland Security Detail Russian Hacking Campaign In New Report (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FBI have released an analysis of the allegedly Russian government-sponsored hacking groups blamed for breaching several different parts of the Democratic party during the 2016 elections. The 13-page document, released on Thursday and meant for information technology professionals, came as Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 elections. The report was criticized by security experts, who said it lacked depth and came too late. "The activity by [Russian intelligence services] is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. government and its citizens," wrote the authors of the government report. "This [joint analysis report] provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations, suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. government." The government report follows several from the private sector, notably a lengthy section in a Microsoft report from 2015 on a hacking team referred to as "advanced persistent threat 28" (APT 28), which the company's internal nomenclature calls Strontium and others have called Fancy Bear. Also mentioned in the government document is another group called APT 29 or Cozy Bear. The Microsoft report contains a history of the groups' operation; a report by security analysts ThreatConnect describes the team's modus operandi; and competing firm CrowdStrike detailed the attack on the Democratic National Committee shortly before subsequent breaches of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign were discovered.
Did you borrow your foreign policy from the 80's?
DNC hacks - perks for the rich, perks for the poor, make the working class pay for it all.
This is why you lost the election.
I am really appalled at how many people don't take the Russian interference seriously and blame it on some kind of Democrat/Obama conspiracy. This has been happening in eastern European countries for decades and Russia has now been targeting also western Europe since the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. Russia is funding right-wing populist parties and helping them out with propaganda all across the western hemisphere in an attempt to discredit our democracies and our free press.
Don't believe it? Google "russia populist funding". Here are the top three links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
It's really scary how much success they are having in sowing distrust in our institutions and our free press. Every time I read someone here decrying some mayor western news outlet as "Fake News" I am reminded of the effectiveness of Putins troll army.
A lot of the technical comments got hit by a downvote brigade last night.
Read down to look at the people actually talking about tools & methods.
What happened that we truly know of:
1. In the summer of 2015, someone (evidence points to Russian) spear-phished passwords from unsavvy staffers on the DNC email server
2. Almost a year later, Wikileaks publishes a dump of DNC emails. It is assumed by many to have come from the previous infiltration, though there are other ways Wikileaks could have obtained the data, and no definitive link connecting the two events have so far been presented.
3. Through the email dump, the American public is able to see the DNC's inner workings, including:
- party officials colluding to hinder Bernie Sanders
- party insider helping the Clinton campaign to cheat during debate
- astroturf campaign to create illusion of spontaneous public protest against opponent
- journalists coordinating with party officials to ensure party messaging is on track
4. Some voters may have reconsidered their voting decisions, or even the decision to participate in this cycle, due to the above information.
5. Critical states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania which were assumed to be safe states for Clinton (and who as a result did not campaign aggressively there), instead fall to Trump during the general election, ensuring a GOP win.
What the press & defeated party instead want you to think:
1. Russia hacked America
2. Trump is now the President
3. "... we're not saying Trump administration is a creation of the Russian state... *wink wink nudge nudge* but the Trump administration is obviously a creation and stupid dumb puppet of the Russian state... for realz tho... also, don't listen to fake news"
There is an immense effort right now to make us take mental shortcuts, to skip certain events in our memories, to forget that certain misdeeds were done not by Russians but by Americans.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Just read the report. It's a stinking pile of BS. Nowhere does it even attempt to provide evidence which would link Russia to the DNC hacks. It makes a claim of "technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used [by Russia]...", outlines some script kiddie type stuff, but provides absolutely NO information or specifics which would link the DNC hack to Russia. The vast majority of the small 13 page "report" is boilerplate security stuff, not specific in any way to either the DNC hack or Russia.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Does that make it OK that the DNC was hacked and its private communications were released in an attempt to influence the election?
The oversensitivity with regards to Trump's election win is sad. Anyone calling his win illegitimate or whatever is an idiot and should be treated as such, but for some reason a whole bunch of people want to continue living out their partisan fantasies after the election is over.
The fact that so many people can then use this as an excuse to not even care about espionage conducted against our election process is nothing short of pathetic.
An alternate reading of this news produces the following news:
* Government agencies and political parties have continued the discussion without a modicum of doubt on document authenticity.
* Agencies have successfully dominated news cycles on this topic and zero discussion has been made regarding DNC primaries tampering.
* No mass media has mentioned, let alone considered why, Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Communications Director Luis Miranda, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall and Chief Executive Amy Dacey all resigned from DNC.
That is the real news in my opinion.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Yeah, this feels eerily reminiscent of 2003 and Iraq's supposed WMDs.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Call me an idiot, then. By all rights, Trump lost by more than a 2% margin. The only reason he was declared the "winner" is that the electoral college is fundamentally rigged to be biased in favor of low-population states, so people in rural areas, which have leaned heavily Republican for as long as I've been alive, get more of a vote than urban areas, which means that the entire system is biased in favor of Republicans.
And not just a little, either. If we define a California vote (the state whose votes are weakest) as a single vote, then every voter in Wisconsin effectively gets four votes. The whole "one man, one vote" thing is so far from being reality that it borders on pure comedy. The fact that Democrats ever win presidential elections is, frankly, amazing given how much the electoral college weakens California's votes.
To put it another way, any win in which almost three million more people voted for the loser than the winner is an illegitimate win, made possible by a system that even Trump himself admitted is rigged. And instead of recognizing that he "won" purely on a technicality and recognizing that he should try to unify the country, he is picking the most extremist, bats**t crazy right-wingnuts for his cabinet, as though somehow he has a "mandate" when in reality, he lost badly.
The last time this happened, the lying right led us into two failed wars that we're still not fully out of and created a worldwide economic depression that we're still digging our way out of. Here's hoping Trump isn't quite as idiotic as his pro-nuclear-weapons rhetoric suggests, because if he is, and if the war hawks have their way, the future of our world will depend on dolphins evolving legs.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.