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A comment on As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise intrigue.

Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by gtrubetskoy on Monday July 25, 2016 @12:38AM (#12156503)
From NYT I'd expect something better than "Evidence so far suggests" with zero evidence presented.

Anyone who's done anything related to security knows that it's impossible to discern much from any trace of an attack left behind - at best you might have IPs of proxy servers they used and you might be able to figure out the vulnerability exploited, but if the attackers were any good (and they're saying "evidence" suggests it's government agency level type stuff) - there is no chance they'd leave anything behind other than false traces to confuse the investigation.

Real evidence would be a corroborated confession, but even an excerpt of logs and/or a little description of what happened other than the "Cozy Bear" story would be great.

So basically someone hacks the DNC servers (and my guess would be that it should be trivial given that this is primarily a volunteer-operated organization), and NYT blames it on GRU. Because being hacked by Russia is cool, compared to being hacked by a nobody because your security is sloppy.

BTW - crowdstrike.com was registered in 2010 with GoDaddy, not exactly trust inspiring.

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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by mc32 on Monday July 25, 2016 @12:52AM (#12156534)
I imagine it's more politically motivated than "we don't want them to look like amateurs" but rather, look who is helping Trump, that bad Putin fellow. The unsaid part is, "we don't want someone Putin favors in the white house, make sure you vote for Clinton."

As others have pointed out, it's at least curious that when the Sony hack happened, and the administration came out a few weeks later and declared it was North Korea, lots of InfoSec stood up and said, wait, it's not that clear... We're not so sure... But here there is no such doubt, at least yet being raised --which is an interesting difference.

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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by Lordarminius on Monday July 25, 2016 @02:05AM (#12156777)
> it's at least curious that when the Sony hack happened...

Not only the attribution is dubious. The whole thing stank down to the timing. My theory is that the Sony hack brouhaha was raised for the specific purpose of obscuring and deflecting attention from the Senate report on torture released on 9/12/2014.

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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by wtf_is_up on Monday July 25, 2016 @12:48AM (#12156525)
The Russian connection was just a deflection tactic to link Trump to Russia. There's no real evidence besides:

* Wikileaks leaked right before the DNC

* This makes Hillary's campaign look bad

* If it's bad for her, it's good for Trump

* Assange works for Russia

* Russia wants Trump to win

Trump has been accused of painting a 'dark picture' of America, but invoking the Red Scare is a whole other level of fear mongering.

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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by tsukikage on Monday July 25, 2016 @06:09AM (#12157606)
"Assange works for Russia"? This is just something we assume everyone accepts now? When did that happen? Last I heard, Assange worked for no-one but his own ego...
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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by Lordarminius on Monday July 25, 2016 @07:36AM (#12157921)
Last I heard, Assange worked for no-one but his own ego...

Really I am disappointed. I'm not even American but I would think that you would respect a man who has taken a bold stand against tyranny. This is how you regard him? In your estimation Snowden is an egotistical too?

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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by kr7 on Monday July 25, 2016 @01:20AM (#12156617)
> a little description of what happened other than the "Cozy Bear" story would be great.

Crowdstrike has published some information on what they found:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...

A second firm claims the same malware was used in other high profile attacks:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/second-security-firm-says-rus...

> BTW - crowdstrike.com was registered in 2010 with GoDaddy, not exactly trust inspiring.

Google Capital and Rackspace seem to think they are legit:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/13/security-company-crowdstri...

> From NYT I'd expect something better than "Evidence so far suggests" with zero evidence presented.

Well, they've been wrong before...

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/20...

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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by kafkaesq on Monday July 25, 2016 @07:24PM (#12162319)
given that this is primarily a volunteer-operated organization

Not even. Since 2008 the major Democratic campaigns have been highly professionalized, on the tech side. Which doesn't mean they're immune to an attack, by any stretch. But if you think the upper tiers of these campaigns are run like scaled-up versions of their field offices... you need to think again.

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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by oh_sigh on Monday July 25, 2016 @12:58AM (#12156553)
Also, there isn't even evidence of an outside hack happening. For all we know, it could be a disgruntled IT guy who wants to be a mini-Snowden. Who the hell knows. All we know is that the DNC tacitly admits that those emails are real.
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Re:As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise... by meshko on Monday July 25, 2016 @01:11AM (#12156586)
I suspect they are talking about metadata pieces found in the Office documents. It could serve as a relatively strong proof that documents where processed by someone at least Russian-speaking.
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