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Hackers Came, But the French Were Prepared (nytimes.com)
Adam Nossiter, David E. Sanger, and Nicole Perlroth, reporting for the New York Times: Everyone saw the hackers coming. The National Security Agency in Washington picked up the signs. So did Emmanuel Macron's bare-bones technology team. And mindful of what happened in the American presidential campaign, the team created dozens of false email accounts, complete with phony documents, to confuse the attackers (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). The Russians, for their part, were rushed and a bit sloppy, leaving a trail of evidence that was not enough to prove for certain they were working for the government of President Vladimir V. Putin but which strongly suggested they were part of his broader "information warfare" campaign. The story told by American officials, cyberexperts and Mr. Macron's own campaign aides of how a hacking attack intended to disrupt the most consequential election in France in decades ended up a dud was a useful reminder that as effective as cyberattacks can be in disabling Iranian nuclear plants, or Ukrainian power grids, they are no silver bullet. The kind of information warfare favored by Russia can be defeated by early warning and rapid exposure.
So you think that a court would consider documents of such dubious heritage at all?
The lengths the Trump army are going to try to deny that Russia wants to fuck with the Western Alliance is stunning. And for what? It's not like Congress is likely to impeach him and remove him any time soon, although if he keeps pulling stunts like Comey, he may hasten his own end.
At any rate, the French and US elections are not the only elections the Russians have been implicated in trying to bugger up, and do you blame them? NATO so thoroughly outstraps them militarily and economically (for chrissake, Italy has a larger GDP than Russia) that cyberwarfare is the one area where they have a relatively level playing field, so of course they're going to use it.
The big problem was the Macron dump seems to have been ludicrously rushed. You have alleged emails claiming plans for the Islamification of France. I mean, seriously, do you think the Macron campaign was actually making that kind of plan? Or maybe you do, the gullibility of the Alt-Right never ceases to astound me.
At any rate, Le Pen lost, and lost massively.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The problem with hacking is that a lot of companies have the "security has no ROI" attitude. Last year, when I interviewed at one place (and definitely didn't take the offer), the CxO gave me the song and dance about "only person that profits from a lock is the lock maker", and when I asked what they would do in case of a breach, the response was, "we will call Accenture and let their world class professionals fix it."
With an attitude like that, it is surprising breaches don't happen more often in the private sector. The problem is that until there is an actual reason, and something that makes top brass actually value security, it won't happen. The -only- thing that has worked is PCI-DSS, because ignoring that hits businesses squarely in the pocketbook.
What does it say that the IT team had enough resources to generate honeypots but couldn't actually... SECURE the emails and just assumed they were going to get hacked anyway?
I guess it shows competence. Lately the question is not “if you get hacked?”, but “what do you do when hacked?”. The risk of any compromising leak is that it could contain fabrications that seem kind of legit. This problem is exacerbated when the leak happens just days before the election, since that is enough time to find dirt and write sensational articles, but not enough time to verify the truthfulness.
The security team correctly identified the threats and used effective countermeasures.
The "conspiracy theorist" label is usually applied to people who have no evidence for their beliefs.
In this case, the cyber defense arm of the US government warned the French of Russian attacks based on the information they had.
You are a moron who is slinging around insults without regard for the truth. Regardless of where you live, you are part of the reason your city, state, and country have problems.
No they won't. They never were. That's an absolute 100% lie. Clinton didn't even call All Trump supporters racists, despite the fact she would have been 100% within her rights given Trump was running a blatantly racist campaign, and people who were supporting him were supporting that.
The claim people keep making is that they voted for Trump because they were told Trump supporters were racist by Democrats. That logic doesn't, and never will, hold up because it's stupid: if you weren't already a Trump supporter, you wouldn't have been insulted by that comment. If you were, you were going to vote for Trump anyway.
Bill Clinton was impeached for "lying under oath", a dubious charge, because he referred to a consensual sexual act as not sex because he believed it legally didn't count as sex. He was not impeached for groping women, he was not impeached for entering the changing rooms of 14 year old models, he wasn't impeached for talking about how sexually attracted he was to his daughter, or any other of the specific and backed up allegations made against Trump.
And the most important part: Bill is not Hillary. Bill Clinton could run "Clinton University" and rip off thousands of poor people, he could have bankrupted numerous suppliers by just not paying them, he could have used Mob labor to build his buildings, he could have a fake charity he stole money from, he could have avoided paying any taxes while living a lavish lifestyle, and he could have, yes, groped and ogled and all the other things Trump is accused of, and it still wouldn't have meant anything negative about Hillary Clinton.
All you can do, six months after that election, is continue making up the most absurd drivel about Clinton and Democrats, rather than address the fact you elected a monster. Think about that, then change course.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Are you mad because for the first time in history, France has a president that is better at English grammar than the US president?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
They didn't need to change their vote to Trump, just not vote. That alone does serious damage to the democratic camp. I know I will never vote for someone who plays this game because they are every bit as toxic as Trump is.
What I mean by that is that Berlusconi was a rich man whose political beliefs didn't fit perfectly into a major party (and won because of disaffection with mainstream politics) and ran the country to indulge and enrich himself.
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So, what is that evidence?
Motivation; ability; ...
That something being the name of an employee of Evrika, a known Kremlin defense contractor.
Now while it's undeniably a possibility that the metadata was planted as part of a 'false-flag' operation, that theory itself lacks both corroborating evidence and plausible motivation (though other actors certainly have the means). Even at the risk of being wrong, reason requires we apply Occam's razor.
Yes, and then there's the public testimony from US intelligence services:
Testifying in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington on Tuesday, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, said American intelligence agencies had seen the attack unfolding, telling their French counterparts, “Look, we’re watching the Russians. --TFA
Look I know what you mean, it's just so damn annoying that the CIA, NSA, DGSE etc, don't run all their classified material past my desk. Don't the know who the HELL I AM?! ... scarily they probably do. :/
Seriously though ... while we're not, and are never likely to be, at the beyond reasonable doubt standard, on the balance of probabilities the publicly available evidence points towards Russian involvement. And that is hardly surprising: the Kremlin explicitly favoured Le Pen and we cannot but expect Russia to deploy its capability in favour of Russian national interest.
You can bank on the fact that in any election anywhere in the world where the Kremlin feels it has an interest in the outcome, Russian aligned hackers and (so called) troll-armies (i.e. social media influencers) will be at work in an attempt to influence the outcome (however marginal that influence may be).
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke