CIA: Russia influenced the election

Which headline are you talking about, DennyAnne?

CNN headline:

Trump calls intelligence briefing on Russian hacking 'constructive'


NYTimes headline:

After Security Meeting, Trump Admits Possibility of Russian Hacking

 

Intel report: Putin directly ordered effort to influence election


Washington (CNN) The US intelligence community concluded in a declassified report released Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an "influence campaign" aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The campaign -- which consisted of hacking Democratic groups and individuals, including Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and releasing that information via third-party websites, including WikiLeaks -- amounted to what the intelligence report called "a significant escalation" in longtime Russian efforts to undermine "the US-led liberal democratic order."

The report was the first official, full and public accounting by the US intelligence community of its assessment of Russian cyberhacking activities during the 2016 campaign and the motivations behind that hacking.

"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump," the report said.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/intelligence-report-putin-election/index.html?adkey=bn

 

NYTIMES one.

 

I just read all 25 pages. They again make accusations without any basis. Just, "trust us." The bulk of the document is critical of Russia using twitter, other social media, and their own media platforms for their messaging. The document is critical of Russia for saying Occupy Wall Street was a fight against the ruling class (seems an accurate description to me). Therefore Russia did it.

Why should we care if Russia uses free speech to get their message across. Seems like 1st amendment type stuff.

Seriously, there is not one shred of evidence offered of Russian involvement in the hacking. I'm talking about some technical clue, like an email header, trace of a connection during the hack through all the proxies and VPNs back to a known operative, or an eyewitness (even an eyewitness isn't really proof). Any one thing would suffice, not "Russia has some motive" they ascribe to them.

If I see any legitimate evidence, hard verifiable evidence, of a link to Putin or even the Russian government, i will gladly say so.

I don't exactly trust Putin, but I don't trust our government. Not after Benghazi and WMDs.

It's right to be skeptical and to ask for some actual proof. The allegations make us look bad without.

 

I will retract what I just wrote if anyone can find any technical evidence of hacking in the document.

 

In case you want a third party view:

Wired magazine is a technical type journal. Not very political, if at all.

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/feds-damning-report-russian-election-hack-wont-convince-skeptics/

The ODNI’s 25-page report (embedded below) from US intelligence agencies lays out a vast Russian intelligence operation that extends from hacking both Democratic and Republican targets to propaganda campaigns to troll-fueled social media disinformation. It re-asserts the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin is behind breaches of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and even state election board websites. And the express intention of those operations, the report states, was to not only disrupt the American electoral process, but to elect Donald Trump.

“Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the report reads. “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.”

Even so, the report leaves out the much hoped-for technical evidence that informed these conclusions. In its “Scope and Sourcing” section, the report explains that this evidence exists, but can’t be declassified. And that means the report won’t satisfy the majority of the cybersecurity community that believes Russia hacked Democratic targets but has demanded more evidence, let alone the diehard deniers of the Kremlin’s fingerprints. “Seeing more of the context in which this happened does make me a little more trusting that this really was Russia,” says Robert Graham, an analyst for the cybersecurity firm Erratasec who has closely followed the Russian hacking investigation. “But knowing what data they probably have, they could have given us more details. And that really pisses me off.”

 

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-hacking-intelligence-20170105-story.html

The long anticipated Joint Analysis Report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI on Dec. 29 met widespread criticism in the technical community. Worse still, some of the advice it offered led to a very alarmist false alarm about supposed Russian hacking into a Vermont electric power station.

Advertised in advance as providing proof of Russian hacking, the report fell embarrassingly short of that goal. The thin gruel that it did contain was watered down further by the following unusual warning atop page 1: "DISCLAIMER: This report is provided 'as is' for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within."

 

Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/2017/01/06/ove...es-russian-hacking-but-theres-no-smoking-gun/

DNI report: Overwhelming case proves Russian hacking, but there’s no smoking gun
The report creates an analytical catch-22: the DNI couldn't reveal its smoking gun even if it had one


The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its official report on the alleged Russian hacking efforts directed against the 2016 presidential election. It is a report that, like so much of the case indicating Russian culpability, contains an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence — but there’s still no smoking gun.

“‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’ is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment that has been provided to the President and to recipients approved by the President,” the report begins. Perhaps anticipating that its lack of conclusive evidence proving Russian involvement would be seized upon by critics, the authors explain that “the Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the precise bases for its assessments” for fear that future investigations could be compromised.

 

They needed to produce ONE shred of evidence, not everything they have.

When they have been technical, they've looked downright foolish.

If you're going to make this kind of public accusation, you better show some proof.

We know the US is guilty of these same accusations because WikiLeaks published millions of our own government documents that describe us doing these things.

I grew up in this industry where I have seen and known hackers and how they work for decades. The claims made by these last two reports are just mind boggling how stupid they think we are. For example, If there was a guccifer 1.0 who was part of a teenage hacking group, the rest of the group might rally behind a guccifer 2.0 moniker. I see nothing in the reports that is clear evidence it is hackers with any link to the Russian government.

Trump isn't wrong when he said 400lb kid could hack from his bedroom. Nobody's proven that wrong (it's just truth, it is what it is). Or that the hacking actually occurred.

An equally plausible explanation is simply someone with an ace to grind (Sanders supporter) simply copied the emails to a thumb drive and handed it over to WikiLeaks.

 

Phishing.

A few times a year, someone I know has their Windows machine hacked. The malware goes through the person's contact list and sends each an email with some sort of proposition to click on a link. A link to share a document or change your password.

Click on the link and you end up on some www site in Poland that looks pixel perfect like a Google reset your password screen.

Unsophisticated users type in their old password, then new one and the hacker now has the password.

This is the scheme that is claimed to get into Podesta's emails. The problem is that the hacker only gets into Podesta's mailbox, not everyone else's.

Of course the hacker will go through Podesta's contact list and send out more of those Phishing emails. It's not clear how many of these highly educated academics fell for the scam, but they all would have had to to produce the entire contents of the DNC's email files stored on their mail server.

While I have seen these Phishing emails among the WikiLeaks files, there is only proof of someone clicking on the link if they admit to it. Not seen that admission yet.

That server in Poland isn't owned by the hacker crew. That would be foolish. They hacked that system so they could not ge traced.

To hack servers, the hacker needs only infect one computer on the internet. The infected computer then goes about trying to hack into other computers at random. Once that computer is compromised, you now have two systems hacking the rest. Then 4, 8, 16, etc. the size of a botnet controlled by hackers can be enormous.

If the hacker controls 10,000 machines and tells the to connect to google over and over, it's a sizable denial of service attack. In reality, 10,000 machines is a puny botnet. The hacker lets his net grow for months until they're in the millions of machines.

The tools to do this kind of thing are freely available to download. Google search might tell you some to try. I wouldn't though, because they are just as likely to hack you right there. But the hackers snapchat, or whatever, and tell each other where to go.

It doesn't take a state sponsor to create the exploits or the hacking tools. It takes one guy with programming skills. He makes the exploit, and 12 year olds with very little skill can download and deploy them.

The hacker tools are designed to limit detection. In fact, almost all people who've been hacked don't realize it at all. The things are incredibly devious. If you are infected, you may as well throw out the whole computer. The hacker tools are designed to install themselves in non volatile memory (like where the system date/time are kept), hidden on your hard disk, or potentially upstream - like your wifi router or your ISP's router.

There's no reason a hacker will directly connect from his machine to any of his botnet. He'd use a proxy connected to a vpn connected to a proxy, etc. the final leg of the connection might look like Russia, or Poland, or China, but the hacker might be in New Jersey somewhere. Each vpn along the way from New Jersey to Russia to he DNC is heavily encrypted.

Like I wrote earlier, the government would have to be at every link along the way from New Jersey to DNC to prove the origin is New Jersey.

It's even trickier when the origin is a server hacked long ago with a timer that counts down and originates the mischief. It would take years of continuous surveillance of every computer on the Internet to even begin to figure out when the time bomb was set and the vpn and proxy path used to set the timer in motion.