CIA: Russia influenced the election

Here's a much more technical analysis by a security expert whose had contracts with the intelligence community.

http://www.robertmlee.org/critiques-of-the-dhsfbis-grizzly-steppe-report/

Because what I’m going to write below is blunt feedback I want to note ahead of time, I’m doing this for the purpose of the community as well as government operators/report writers who read to learn and become better. I understand that it is always hard to publish things from the government. In my time working in the U.S. Intelligence Community on such cases it was extremely rare that anything was released publicly and when it was it was almost always disappointing as the best material and information had been stripped out. For that reason, I want to especially note, and say thank you, to the government operators who did fantastic work and tried their best to push out the best information. For those involved in the sanitation of that information and the report writing – well, read below.

...

Even worse, page 4 of the document notes other groups identified as RIS (Figure 4). This would be exciting normally. Government validation of private sector intelligence helps raise the confidence level of the public information. Unfortunately, the list in the report detracts from the confidence because of the interweaving of unrelated data.

As an example, the list contains campaign/group names such as APT28, APT29, COZYBEAR, Sandworm, Sofacy, and others. This is exactly what you’d want to see although the government’s justification for this assessment is completely lacking (for a better exploration on the topic of naming see Sergio Caltagirone’s blog post here). But as the list progresses it becomes worrisome as the list also contains malware names (HAVEX and BlackEnergy v3 as examples) which are different than campaign names.

...

In some locations in the CSV the indicators are IP addresses with a request to network administrators to look for it and in other locations there are IP addresses with just what country it was located in. This information is nearly useless for a few reasons. First, we do not know what data set these indicators belong to (see my previous point, are these IPs for “Sandworm”, “APT28” “Powershell” or what?). Second, many (30%+) of these IP addresses are mostly useless as they are VPS, TOR exit nodes, proxies, and other non-descriptive internet traffic sites (you can use this type of information but not in the way being positioned in the report and not well without additional information such as timestamps). Third, IP addresses as indicators especially when associated with malware or adversary campaigns must contain information around timing. I.e. when were these IP addresses associated with the malware or campaign and when were they in active usage? IP addresses and domains are constantly getting shuffled around the Internet and are mostly useful when seen in a snapshot of time.

 

The first paragraph above for riverman's benefit. The last echoes what I wrote myself, about TOR and proxies, etc.

Also, the specific malwares appear to be identified, none particularly attributable to the Russian government.

 

That's fine. Being skeptical is ok. But you may never know the actual answer. You almost certainly don't now. So what's the point of making 10,000 posts claiming people are lying? You don't know they are. You just want it to be true.

Again I ask - what would they be gaining by concocting this elaborate ruse?

barfo

 

Without even scant proof, the only assumption is the government is lying to us.

Obama wanted to kick out the 35 diplomats, to stir up a conflict before Trump took office. Putin punked him by not responding.

Obama also took a parting shot at Israel, via the UN.

 

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312162-nearing-exit-obama-seeks-to-tie-trumps-hands

Nearing exit, Obama seeks to tie Trump's hands

President Obama has taken a number of unilateral actions in the waning days of his tenure that appear designed to box in President-elect Donald Trump.

Obama's decision Thursday to sanction Russian entities for election-related hacking is just the latest obstacle he has placed in Trump's way.

 

I don't think that's the only possible assumption, but if that's what works for you, go for it.

Do you assume that all people and entities are lying to you when you cannot verify first-hand, or just the government?

Obama could have kicked out 35 diplomats without even giving a reason, if he wanted to.

The 'punked' claim is just silly - if Putin had instead kicked out 35 of our diplomats, or 70, or done whatever in response, you'd be saying the exact same thing about how he punked Obama, because it's what you want to believe.

In any case, that doesn't seem to answer my question, since the assertion of Russian hacking was made starting months ago, and the 35 just got booted a couple of weeks ago.

barfo

 

They're making the claims, the burden of proof is on them.

I do a lot of looking into claims made by whoever. It's called intellectual curiosity. Try it.

If Putin responded in kind to Obama's parting shot, it would have been expected. To not respond is advanced statesmanship. Obama came out looking small, especially since he can't provide proof.

 

The Daily Beast, MSNBC talking heads. It's funny. The last two paragraphs are what I wroye earlier, in their words.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/06/how-the-u-s-enabled-russian-hack-truthers.html

How the U.S. Hobbled Its Hacking Case Against Russia and Enabled Truthers

“At every level this report is a failure,” says security researcher Robert M. Lee. “It didn’t do what it set out to do, and it didn’t provide useful data. They’re handing out bad information to the industry when good information exists.” At issue is the “Joint Analyses Report” released by DHS last Thursday as part of the Obama administration’s long-awaited response to Russia’s election hacking. The 13-page document was widely expected to lay out the government’s evidence that Russia was behind the intrusions into the Democratic National Committee’s private network, and a separate attack that exposed years of the private email belonging to Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

Instead, the report is a gumbo of earnest security advice mixed with random information from a broad range of hacking activity. One piece of well-known malware used by criminal hackers, the PAS webshell, is singled out for special attention, while the sophisticated Russian “SeaDuke” code used in the DNC hack barely rates a mention. A full page of the report is dedicated to listing names that computer security companies have assigned to Russian malware and hacking groups over the years, information that nobody is asking for.

Rather than focusing on the Russian intelligence services, the U.S. seemingly opted to gather all Russia-sourced hacking under a single rubric, code named “Grizzly Steppe,” putting everything from online bank heists to identity theft in the same bucket as the Kremlin-linked intrusions into the White House, State Department, and the DNC.

Though the written report is confusing, it’s the raw data released along with it that truly exasperates security professionals. The department released 876 internet IP addresses it says is linked to Grizzly Steppe hacking, and urged network administrators everywhere to add the list to their networking monitoring.

Lists of IP addresses used by hackers can be useful “indicators of compromise” in network security—admins can check the list against access logs, or program an intrusion detection system to sound the alarm when it sees traffic from a suspect address. But that assumes that the list is good: carefully culled, and surrounded with enough context that administrators know what to do when they get a hit.

The DHS list is none of these things, as Lee, founder of the cyber security firm Dragos, discovered when he ran the list against a stored cache of known clean traffic his company keeps around for testing. The results stunned him. “We had thousands of hits,” he says. “We had an extraordinary high amount of false positives on this dataset… Six of them were Yahoo e-mail servers.”

It turns out that some, perhaps most, of the watchlisted addresses have a decidedly weak connection to the Kremlin, if any. In addition to the Yahoo servers, about 44 percent of the addresses are exit nodes in the Tor anonymity network, The Intercept’s Micah Lee reported Wednesday. Tor is free software used primarily for anonymous web browsing. Russian hackers use Tor, but so do plenty of other people.

 

Actually it's not. They aren't under any obligation to prove their case to you.

Ooh, like 200-level statesmanship? Wow. Putin's such a genius.

Not responding to sanctions... man, they'll be writing books about that for years. Call it "The Art of Accepting Sanctions", maybe.

If only Putin could rule this country, he's so frickin' awesome! I mean, sooner than 12 days from now. Why wait?

To you. But then he would have come out looking small to you no matter what happened, because you are predisposed to that position.

barfo

 

And yet for some reason you don't do a lot (or even a little) of looking into claims made by one Donald J. Trump. Why is that, do you suppose?

barfo

 

I most certainly do. Oddly, my original takes during the campaign was that he's being silly. Look into his statements, and there's a lot of truth to them. Things like anchor babies aren't guaranteed citizenship by the 14th.

Or that it's better to have a good relationship with Russia.

Deny it, barfo.

 

Better than Obama statesmanship. It's frankly an embarrassment for the outgoing president, as it was when Putin rescued him from his cross the line pledge in Syria.

The government is telling the truth. Prove they're not lying and I will believe you.

Without any proof, it's a bunch of butt hurt losers acting like crybabies over an unproven conspiracy theary.

 

James Clapper's word is good enough. /sarcasm

https://thinkprogress.org/in-oct-20...aq-moved-wmd-to-syria-8fcc73cd1be7#.wbzyofjur

 

The intelligence agencies and many republicans in congress are butt hurt losers?

What did they lose and when did they lose it?

barfo

 

I thought we weren't supposed to believe him. Make up your mind.

barfo