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More Evidence Ties Alleged DNC Hacker Guccifer 2.0 To Russian Intelligence (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: It may be a while since you've heard the handle "Guccifer 2.0," the hacker who took responsibility for the infamous DNC hack of 2016. Reports from the intelligence community at the time, as well as common sense, pegged Guccifer 2.0 not as the Romanian activist he claimed to be, but a Russian operative. Evidence has been scarce, but one slip-up may have given the game away. An anonymous source close to the U.S. government investigation of the hacker told the Daily Beast that on one single occasion, Guccifer 2.0 failed to log into the usual VPN that disguised their traffic. As a result, they left one honest IP trace at an unnamed social media site.
That IP address, "identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency's headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow," the Daily Beast reported. (The GRU is one of the Russia's security and intelligence organs.) Previous work by security researchers had suggested this, but it's the first I've heard of evidence this direct. Assuming it's genuine, it's a sobering reminder of how fragile anonymity is on the internet -- one click and the whole thing comes crashing down.
That IP address, "identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency's headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow," the Daily Beast reported. (The GRU is one of the Russia's security and intelligence organs.) Previous work by security researchers had suggested this, but it's the first I've heard of evidence this direct. Assuming it's genuine, it's a sobering reminder of how fragile anonymity is on the internet -- one click and the whole thing comes crashing down.
no wonder reddit wont cough up the logs
Yes, we should believe. I rather prefer to believe detailed technical reports like EFF do, with all details, than this bullshit with "well informed anonymous sources" that often turns to be "our imagination".
Uploaded at 22MB/sec (capital B), or so goes the narrative. That's a nice upload circuit. Why is is suspiciously close to the expected transfer rate of a USB2 drive? Gee I wonder.
It seems amazing that the GRU internet access would have IPs pointing back to them. The end point of their network would be set to something innocuous by default. This would be done be done at the network level, so it would be impossible to screw up and give your real ip. This is equivalent to "the professional assassin slipped up and left his passport on top of the victim".
Uploaded at 22MB/sec (capital B), or so goes the narrative. That's a nice upload circuit. Why is is suspiciously close to the expected transfer rate of a USB2 drive? Gee I wonder.
No.
MUST BLAME RUSSIA!!!
Repeat it enough times and you can be a zombified fool, too.
Top-level Russian Spy super-hacker just happened to use his Kremlin IP address. Yeah, I bet it happened just like that.
I think most of us have fucked up on occasion.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
How easy is masking your IP address as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow?
"Guccifer 2.0 sprang into existence on June 15, 2016, hours after a report by a computer security firm forensically tied Russia to an intrusion at the Democratic National Committee. In a series of blog posts and tweets over the following seven months—conspicuously ending right as Trump took office and not resuming—the Guccifer persona published a smattering of the DNC documents while gamely projecting an image as an independent Romanian hacktivist who’d breached the DNC on a lark.
Motherboard conducted a devastating interview with Guccifer that exploded the account’s claims of being a native Romanian speaker. Based on forensic clues in some of Guccifer’s leaks, and other evidence, a consensus quickly formed among security experts that Guccifer was completely notional.
“Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.”
Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke led an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia.
But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter.
Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast’s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.)"
It was inside job, with a USB drive at 23MB/s transfer rate. This is known and documented.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news...
Life is not for the lazy.
The professional excellence and utter dishonesty of both the Russian state intelligence apparatus and the American deep state make any informed, verifiable determination impossible. The spooks and their masters are pretty damned good at their obfuscation and disinformation games.
Rather than hitch oneself to a favorite political or ideological bandwagon, I prefer to adhere to a finely-crafted and well-tuned cynicism that demands treating this and every other spy versus spy story as low comedy.
It makes for passable diversion as I read such stories while comfortably relaxing in Diogenes' pithos.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I don't necessarily buy into all of this myself, but why do people tend to treat the government and its operatives as infallible masterminds? If they were so capable in these regards, why is so much else a complete cluster fuck?
Even if you want to argue that the intelligence organizations are not staffed by your typical rank and file idiots, highly skilled, very intelligent people are still capable of making mistakes. Even though the odds of those are quite small by themselves, doing something enough times makes it likely to have slipped up somewhere.
Trump dosent need those dotards. He is now going to represent himself and testify in front of Mueller.
I totally agree Trump doesn't need any dotards. Why hire somebody when you're a top ranking dotard yourself?
And by all means let him represent himself in front of Mueller. What could possibly go wrong?
The same reason the news media doesn't talk about all the bribes the Bushes accepted from the Saudi government. It's yesterday's news. There's a new ass-clown in charge who make all the previous ass-clowns look saintly in comparison.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Trump dosent need those dotards. He is now going to represent himself and testify in front of Mueller. I was losing faith in him, but with this it is restored.
Har de har ...
Yeah, he might be doomed this time ... what is this, like the 500th time he's been doomed?
Or, you might be Wile E Coyote ... with your can't fail Acme thing about to fall on your head, again. We'll see.
My money's on the anvil, just from the track record so far ...
100% true, eh? I guess it's just as true as when President Obama mocked then-candidate Mitt Romney for calling out Russia at the debate -- followed by all of the talking heads also mocking Romney and applauding Obama's awareness? It's almost as if the talking heads for either party on the media networks try to support their favored candidate. Nope, that must not be it though because the other mainstream media sources are all Democrat-favoring and thus must be 100% factual. They would never stoop so low as to prefer one candidate and ignore facts.
Either Russia is a problem or it's not. I personally think that Russia is a problem. They actively help our enemies and behave as an enemy, which makes them -- wait for it -- an enemy. But you have to be realistic about their capabilities.
Pretending that Russia is the Boogeyman helps no one except Russia. Russia went overnight from being a joke, to a genius superpower with their ability to manipulate over 62 million voters with $100,000. Or it was the racists voting against the other white candidate (but who couldn't bring themselves out to vote against the black candidate). Only those two reasons could explain Trump winning the election. There's no such thing as people voting along party lines or absolutely hating the other candidate enough to vote.
Let's assume for a moment that the Steele dossier is completely true. Trump is blackmailable by the Russians, ignoring now all of that information is in the open. Now, let's flip it around onto Hillary, the Secretary of State during Obama's first term who famously announced the great reset. Follow that up with the fact that there is a line of money directly (I won't call it a bribe or payoff for the sake of argument) connecting Hillary's decision to signing off on the sale of Uranium One to Russia. Why pretend that her past behavior with Russia, which was an inability to negotiate with them at best or downright selling us out at worst, would be somehow superior to Trump? Why pretend that Russia somehow preferred Trump to Hillary given their past, very real ability to get what they want from her? Trump has literally allowed the killing of Russians in Syria, which is something that Obama was literally too afraid to do with his infamous line in the sand and Hillary has proven to be a lot more like Obama than Trump.
As for the White House denying reports that they are replacing people -- that is literally the exact same thing as any business or other government office. You cannot confirm reports that someone is going to be let go before the person has been let go. Only the most naive person can assume anything else. The same thing just happened with now-Former Deputy Director McCabe before he was fired -- the DoJ denied everything until it finally happened (leaks still happened though).