> The investigation by officials began Friday, when the Vermont utility reported its alert to federal authorities, some of whom told The Washington Post that code associated with the Russian hackers had been discovered within the system of an unnamed Vermont utility.

> A senior DHS official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive security matter, defended the report.

> “We know the Russians are a highly capable adversary who conduct technical operations in a manner intended to blend into legitimate traffic,” the official said. The indicators of compromise contained in the report, he said, “are indicative of that. That’s why it’s so important for net defenders to leverage the recommended mitigations contained in the [report], implement best practices, and analyze their logs for traffic emanating from those IPs, because the Russians are going to try and hide evidence of their intrusion and presence in the network.”

You may not like the quality or the presentation of the sources as more weighty than they turned out to be, but they are sources.

How has the WaPo not got this message yet? Government officials talking about Russia are probably lying

It's not like anti-Russian saber rattling was a thing even 12 months ago, despite the Ukraine situation.

The DNC hacks are a thing that happened, and a lot of people outside the government seem to agree that evidence points to it happening from Russia, by actors who seem to have worked with the Russian government.

If you accept the DNC hack analysis, it's not absurd to imagine that closer scrutiny reveals more infrastructure that Russian state actors have penetrated. Especially given that we know infrastructure is more vulnerable that we might like.

Considering that Republicans are not peddling the anti-Russia line, what's the angle here? in the last 6 months of an 8 year term, Obama decides to activate the anti-Russian propaganda machine? Only for it to be dismantled in 2 weeks anyways with the new administration? What sequence of events causes that?

Hillary losing elections triggered that. Warlord as Putin is, you can't blindly blame everyone else for your faults.

So either the government is bribing a bunch of security researchers (who doesn't want the scoop that the consensus is wrong?), the government executed a perfect false flag to blame Russia on something (why do this? It's not like having Russia as an enemy is useful for us), the analyses by these researchers are right, or something else.

My money is on a decent amount of smart people all arriving somewhere near the truth.

[0]: https://www.threatconnect.com/blog/guccifer-2-0-dnc-breach/

If not why even bring classication into it?

I brought classification up because it's one of the most common reasons for sources being anonymous. Whether or not you think they should be talking to the press, they do, and the press affords them certain protections doing so.

I don't think it's been "proven" false. I don't think it's very likely, but that is a different question.