CIA: Russia influenced the election

I accept your admission of the fact.

#NeverTrump
Hillary '16

 

The media accepts him at his word.

I say he's lying without proof he isn't.

 

Added /sarcasm. Too bad I couldn't do it in crayon.

 

Errata security.

http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/01/dear-obama-from-infosec.html#more

Dear Obama, From Infosec

Dear President Obama:

We are more than willing to believe Russia was responsible for the hacked emails/records that influenced our election. We believe Russian hackers were involved. Even if these hackers weren't under the direct command of Putin, we know he could put a stop to such hacking if he chose. It's like harassment of journalists and diplomats. Putin encourages a culture of thuggery that attacks opposition, without his personal direction, but with his tacit approval.

Your lame attempts to convince us of what we already agree with has irretrievably damaged your message.

Instead of communicating with the America people, you worked through your typical system of propaganda, such as stories in the New York Times quoting unnamed "senior government officials". We don't want "unnamed" officials -- we want named officials (namely you) who we can pin down and question. When you work through this system of official leaks, we believe you have something to hide, that the evidence won't stand on its own.

We still don't believe the CIA's conclusions because we don't know, precisely, what those conclusions are. Are they derived purely from companies like FireEye and CrowdStrike based on digital forensics? Or do you have spies in Russian hacker communities that give better information? This is such an important issue that it's worth degrading sources of information in order to tell us, the American public, the truth.

 

Ok, two things you got wrong there. First of all, I'm not claiming any knowledge of where the truth lies. Maybe the whole thing is made up. I don't know, and neither does Deny.
I'm merely pointing out that he doesn't know, but is acting as if he does.

Secondly, what Deny is claiming is literally a conspiracy theory. He is proposing that there is a giant conspiracy, involving multiple agencies of government, the speaker of the house, the majority leader of the senate, members of both parties, etc. If his theory is right, there is a conspiracy. So of course I'm calling him a conspiracy theorist. It's what he is, whether he's right or wrong about the existence of the conspiracy.

And anytime someone proposes a conspiracy theory, it is relevant to ask how and why? Conspiracies take a lot of effort, you have to keep all those in the know from letting the (purple) cat out of the bag. So why would any of the players here be motivated to conspire in this way? I don't see any significant gain for anyone involved. I don't think 'butt hurt' is really a sufficient motivation, though. Maybe some do.

barfo

 

Denny, at least, says:

In what way am I exaggerating his position? He says he assumes that the government is lying to us.

His assumption is that there is a massive conspiracy aimed at blaming the Russians, for reasons he can't quite explain, but that somehow involve 'butt hurt'.

You say the 'argument hasn't got that far yet', but this is post #869 in this thread...

barfo

 

Well, you ought to think about it. Individuals lie for all sorts of reasons, but I'd guess it's pretty rare for a large group of people to agree to lie about something without any reason whatsoever.

If it is all a big conspiracy cooked up by Trump's many enemies, aka the butt hurt, as has been alleged, then wouldn't Trump want to immediately reveal the actual facts when he takes office?

barfo

 

Uhm, no, that's not what I'm doing.

I suggested you think about why a conspiracy that you say you might be inclined to believe in would happen, and I asked why the conspiracy would fade away when Trump takes office, given that he would have reasons to expose it.

You said you'd be inclined to believe they were lying, but you didn't know why they would.
You predicted that the issue would fade away after Trump takes office.

I merely questioned those statements of yours. If you didn't mean to say those things, then you can retract them if you like.

barfo

 

barfo given yet another lesson in logic.

 

I've found claimed evidence outside of the government's reports, but it is still dubious. The government reports still contain absolutely zero evidence linking any leak or theft of emails back to Putin.

The virus identified by the company that the DNC HIRED (hired to say whatever the DNC wants, so beware) is based upon an application written by a Chinese company in the early 2000s. The security company was able to download the source code to the virus - hence anyone was able. The source code to the virus has been available online for anyone to download and compile.

I do believe Russian hackers use this virus (X-Agent) but I do believe it's origin and use are impossible to attribute solely to them.

I repeat, the source code was freely available online for anyone to download, compile, and I'll add: modify to suit the needs of hackers.

The virus was compiled on a linux system with the language set to Russian. But it's only circumstantial evidenced of any link to the government there or to Putin. Anyone with access to the source code could have compiled it. It could have been compiled on a server in Russia that was hacked by an American hacker. And not all Russians who hack are at all involved with the Russian government - for example, there are Ukrainian hackers who target the Russian government all the time.

It's also important to note that this virus is suited for email phishing schemes, not for the attack that succeeded against the DNC server. It has the functionality to act as a client application to fetch email (as Podesta or the user who's been hacked) only, iterate through the company directory (LDAP, if you understand me), and so on. The original chinese company's software is remarkable in its range of capabilities for such a small footprint (less than 2MB in size, compiled).

The spear phishing attack that Podesta (or his secretary, associate, whoever) fell for was tracked back to a single btly account. That is a service that shortens URLs, giving you a new short URL that links to a much longer one. So you can use on Twitter without using up your 140 characters as fast. Shortening a URL with .ru domains would obfuscate that the user would be viewing a page on a server in Russia (or Poland or Maryland).

This btly account was not password protected, and contained 4000+ links apparently targeted toward the DNC, DNC actors, and US government agencies. The claim is that this limited and focused list of targeted email addresses implies a specific interest by only the Russians (well, any foreign intelligence agency for that matter).

What's left unsaid is why not password protected, how they know these were solely targeted at specific emails, and if there were a 2nd, 3rd ... hundredth other btly account with more links that might have been served (sent by email) to completely unrelated people.

Not password protected is something a serious hacker would not do if it left a true trail that could lead back to the hacker. Rather, these btly accounts could be created by automatic means by the hundreds or thousands if need be. This makes much more sense. The specific 4000+ links and emails these were sent to seem consistent with what I suggested earlier - the virus went through the contact list of Podesta or someone who had Podesta in his/her contact list, generating a btly link for each one.

Some of the linkage to the Russian government is historical patterns of attack. I'm not sure how previous attacks were attributed to the Russian government in the first place, so this linkage needs to be substantiated to have any relevance at all. This specific virus has been identified by typical malware detection programs (e.g. your Norton, Windows, whatever antivirus software) for quite a while, indicating that all sorts of people have receive the virus.

In fact, I received a phishing email from a friend. I deleted the email and emailed him to let him know he was hacked. I don't work for the government or the DNC.

He then sent this email to his entire contact list:



WaPost (or was it NYTimes) ran a story yesterday saying new evidence has come to light further connecting these hacks to Putin. The evidence was intercepted emails showing the Russians were happy Trump won. Sorry, but there are billions of people who are happy Trump won and these celebratory emails were not damning at all. If they said, "our hacks worked!" it would be an admission of guilt and I'd agree Russia was involved.

There is other evidence that the security company claims as truth that does not appear to be truth. For example, they claim this virus is nearly identical to one deployed by the Russian government as an android app/virus. The purpose of that virus is to provide position information of Russian tanks and troops and so on. Turns out this android app/virus had none of the capabilities the security company claimed (such as GPS).

Another very important point: The DNC refused to allow the FBI access to the infected server and client machines. This alone raises a big red flag. Why not? And if the government had no access, how can they be certain the hack happened as was claimed?

I repeat that the government has provided no hard evidence of linkage to Russia or Putin. They don't have to produce everything they have, but even one convincing bit would lend them any credibility at all.

Plus, even if the Russian government hacked Podesta and the DNC and Hillary's server and every Democrat in the country, there's no evidence they were the source of information released through WikiLeaks. Any person with access to the machine and a USB drive could have copied all the files and delivered to WikiLeaks (through a 3rd party or whatever).

 

All that said, the information released by WikiLeaks has not been claimed to be falsified or otherwise not the real deal.

It is unfortunate that democrats believe the Truth did them in and that the only way they rightly could have won is by doing all the bad things the emails showed and hiding it.

 

Also, it's stunning how moronic the DNC was. They ran a Windows network, which is a giant risk for being hacked in the first place. If they had simply used commercial Gmail service, it is unlikely the entirety of the emails sent through Google would have been hacked or able to be copied to a thumb drive.

 

Uh...