Leaked Chats Show Alleged Russian Spy Seeking Hacking Tools (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: The leak of an alleged Russian hacker's conversations with a security researcher shows more about the shadowy group of 12 Russian spies indicted by the FBI for targeting the 2016 U.S. election. The researcher, who gave her exchanges with the alleged hacker to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said she wasn't pleased to learn she had been corresponding with an alleged Russian spy. But she wasn't particularly surprised either.

Comments

Reminder: This is not going away.

[RyanFenton]

Every time a story like this comes up, a large number of folks raise objections to the very idea of investigating right-wing election issues.

Well, this isn't going away. Benghazi investigations lasted for 3 years, with zero convictions or even serious cases. If you in any way accepted that process, you have ZERO legs to stand against on an investigation that had already lead to multiple convictions and guilty pleas, and is currently involved in a large number of major court cases, increasing constantly.

And if push too hard to try and force it to stop, the protests will shut down this nation. They will be larger than anything we've ever seen.

None of this is going away.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Reminder: This is not going away.

[quantaman]

How is this a "right-wing" voting issue? Which party has always been against voter ID laws and removing the deceased from voter rolls?

This about election hacking, both potential hacking of the actual apparatus used to conduct elections (voting machines, state governments, election vendors, etc) but also hacking of political actors in order to influence political outcomes.

Whining about non-existent voter fraud that is really just a transparent pretext for voter suppression efforts is a different discussion.

Re:Reminder: This is not going away.

[Train0987]

https://www.reuters.com/articl...

Re:Reminder: This is not going away.

[Nidi62]

Do you even read the articles you link to? The Democrats aren't complaining about dead people being removed, they are complaining that it removes people who haven't voted in a couple years. Programs such as this also tend to remove people only based on name/DOB and quite regularly purge people that should not be purged.

Is anyone surprised?

[cascadingstylesheet]

Is anyone surprised?

The thing is, "Russian spy tries to spy" != "Trump is a Russian mole/dupe/partner/something, OMG lolz". Which is the implication we are apparently supposed to believe.

Re:Russian spy?

[Train0987]

I'm sorry, Russia is a global superpower with unlimited financial and human resources devoted to spycraft and hacking. To suggest that an international spy is using public Twitter posts and emails to a random researchers asking for zero-day exploits is beyond absurd. It's comical to anyone who knows anything about intelligence agencies or tech security, but of course the target of this propaganda tends to be the lowest common denominator who will just believe anything.

Huh?

[Kludge]

Because the NSA never taps the expertise of researchers outside of their own walls? That is preposterous.

Exploits are like any other commodity. You go to the people who have them, regardless of who they are.

Re:Russian spy?

[Nidi62]

It's comical to anyone who knows anything about intelligence agencies or tech security,

Intelligence agencies or other covert operations quite often will try to use technology or equipment not sourced internally in order to hide who they are really working for and to provide deniability. Anyone who knows anything about intelligence agencies would know this.

Re:How long will /. push this nonsense narrative?!

[ArchieBunker]

Russia didn't hack the election. They hacked DNC emails and bought Facebook ads. Funny how Facebook was alright in taking that money until Hillary lost.

Re:Republicans don't care as long as their guy won

[LynnwoodRooster]

He wasn't their guy. You are wrong.