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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".
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".
I think most of us have fucked up on occasion.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
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.
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