How Russia Recruited Elite Hackers For Its Cyberwar (nypost.com)

Lasrick quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternate source): For more than three years, rather than rely on military officers working out of isolated bunkers, Russian government recruiters have scouted a wide range of programmers, placing prominent ads on social media sites, offering jobs to college students and professional coders, and even speaking openly about looking in Russia's criminal underworld for potential talent. From the New York Post: "Russia's Defense Ministry bought advertising on Vkontakta, the country's most popular social media site, to lure those who were more talented with a keyboard than an AK-47 rifle. 'If you graduated from college, if you are a technical specialist, if you are ready to use your knowledge, we give you an opportunity,' the ad promised, according to the Times. The ad went on to assure recruits that they would be part of units called science squadrons based at military installations where they would live in 'comfortable accommodation' and showed an apartment outfitted with a washing machine, the Times reported. The Defense Ministry even dangled the chance to dodge Russia's mandatory draft by allowing university students to join a science squadron instead and then questioned them about their proficiency with programming languages, the report said."

Comments

Re:really?

[superwiz]

And if you still don't think "let's find some Russians to blame" is the modus operandi for handling elections loss in the DNC, just recall this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman

They rounded up some RF nationals who worked in finance (not even in government) and expelled them ON JULY 4th in the year when they were trying to stem the tide of the upcomming losses which were to come from the Tea Party surge in the mid-term elections. Their "espionage" consisted of advising RF government in financial matters... imagine that. Some finance guys advising foreign government in financial matters. Don't take me wrong. I am a very vocal critic of Putin's government. And I usually find myself on the side of vehemently mocking RF apologists. RF could not sway Ukrainian election (which is why they had to resort to open warfare with Ukraine). But now we are supposed to believe that they can sway US elections? Why? Because there is a few RF citizens engaging in some credit card fraud? So Russians are these super hackers all of a sudden? But only when DNC losses the election. When the RF manages to get a glance at some military data, that's not news because that's on Obama's watch. I call bull shit.

Re:Hypocrisy

[unixisc]

Actually, it was done twice by 2 US presidents - Clinton and Obama. Both did what they could to try and get Netanyahu beaten in the Israeli elections - w/ Clinton sending Carville to manage Labour's campaign and actually pulling it off - getting Ehud Barak elected

While I don't believe that the WikiLeaks was the straw that broke the camel's back and tilted this election Trump's way, in the event that it actually did, it couldn't have happened to a more deserving candidate

Re:Hypocracy

[AmiMoJo]

I didn't realize that the CIA and FBI were now "bhutt hurt liberal media shills", thanks for clarifying that.

I honestly don't know how conservatives sleep at night, knowing that their system failed badly enough to put Trump in the White House (too many candidates spreading their support too thin, failing to counter his bullshit effectively)... I guess they are just happy that they can now ram through all their policies and are willing to overlook the rest of it.

They must be terrified over what Russian has on the GOP though. You can bet that if Putin's man in the White House ever goes rogue there will be some strategic leaks to neuter him.

Re:What cyberwar?

[tinkerton]

I don't know how much of the Russian hacking scandal is valid and how much is PR (propaganda).

But PR does not care about truth or falsehood, it will use anything. The last large analysis of a campaign that I know of is
from the Iraq war. You can find the report here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...
Note the extent of the organisation, how many people and resources are involved. It's yuge. And the variation in types of stories. There can be speculation, fear mongering(which does not require lying, you just worry about possibilities), claims, plain false stories. It's a great analysis.
These people haven't been sitting on their asses since then.
In this case there's a campaign to ruin the relation with Russia and make it very hard for Trump to mend that(only russian stooges want better relations with russia).And to take away the focus from the content of the leaks, which were uh about what again?
With fake news there is little or no build up. It's just rumors made up of thin air. That's amateurish and low budget.
Real campaigns work on many fronts at once. Once you have official sources and favored journalists channelling anonymous sources you're instantly playing on another level.
In this case the trumped up charges are that the Russians made sure Trump was elected by hacking Podesta and DNC computers and passing them to wikileaks.
With a good campaign every reasonable person should start to doubt and think there must be really something to it.

Wikileaks say (reluctantly) that they got their data from the inside, not through hacking and not through the russians.

Suppose there's a hack. The reaction to is a choice. You can choose to minimize it. You can choose to respond in kind. Usually secret agencies would fight this out quietly. You can choose to take the opportunity to escalate the tensions as much as possible. That is clear intent.