I would also expect Russian/Chinese hackers to get someone to come into such a discussion such as this, and deflect comments against them towards the CIA/NSA, as you have done 4 times already in this small thread. Who can believe anything any more, in the post-modern over-information age?

yea i could be, that's the point. I don't trust any government or "corporate" source on this type of stuff unless they show me physical evidence. I ain't defending those countries if that's what your suggesting, i am very anti CCP and Putin but i don't just attribute stuff to them because some "expert" says they did a hack.. based on what? something that could easily be made to look like any state did it like what the dump from the CIA shows... i use CIA because that's the only public state information we have about this type of program.

Exactly.

One would expect every intelligence group and sophisticated criminal to attempt to misdirect in exactly this way.

whats the misdirect? is it not true a state would not try to obfuscate the who is doing the attack? so Microsoft telling us its "X" without direct physical evidence is bs to me. Even the NSA intercepts network equipment orders and installs backdoor before sending them back to being delivered... now your hack is coming from "X" but it was done from "Y" using that hacked router etc, you get the picture? how can you know who did what?

Yes, but that is almost as true for foreign groups as domestic ones.

I think we cannot know the answer. But the info from Microsoft shouldn't be weighted too much since they are a contractor.

Could be Russia, could be domestic agencies. I think it is safer to deduct responsibility by the reaction.

yea that's my point, who can know unless you have like a spy in the place doing the hacking. Yes of course China and Russia are probably doing these things, i just don't accept this type of evidence, just like i didn't accept the "WMD" bs

Ooh yeah Vault 7 but we all know all nation states spy and hack each other. We are in a whole new world where we now have bipolar situation of Eurasians vs Anglo-Saxons going full spectrum warfare against each other.