If anyone truly wants to refute it, they just have to visit the forums SABU found and figure out if it's the right tool or not.
No one in eastern europe knows how to run a honeypot? Or the article is wrong that Russia attacked them? If they are attacking non government computers that doesn't include every candidate's website?
I have no question that Russia has infiltrated these machines and is as interested in manipulating elections as the US is capable, but manipulation through public disclosure of data is not a precedent Russia should want. I think the treatment of Russia is clearly a boogey man response and everyone would know that and know they needed such a deflection, if they were going to mount such a rough shod attack.
Forensics could only deal with a serial killer who collected used condoms to confuse them since he used too many. I have to wonder how many were cleverer and didnt make it into tales of the forensic experts.. Digital forensics can only recognize patterns and know what the chosen style was, which can at most eliminate amatuers that are too low value to attract attacks.
We're getting into Calvinball territory here.
(Nowhere did I say Russia attacks without traces, script kiddies just watch ninja films. They are among the tens of thousands of attackers that leave traces of attempts every few minutes. The only inherent advantage state attackers have is that they don't need to monitize so 90% of the ways they should get noticed are gone, leaving them to get noticed more by honeypots than people running machines on the open Internet with no specific plan to detect intrusions.)
The problem for Russia skeptics is that as easy as it was to own up the DNC, it is in fact very difficult to own it up in a way that points a finger back to Russia, because the "finger" in this case is a collection of IOCs forensically taken from previous attacks that are in most cases known only to law enforcement and to a few very reputable attribution firms.