US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6487

On January 01 2017 11:05 TanGeng wrote:
CrowdStrike was the primary source and is still the only source of some possibly relevant and credible info DNC cyber-security. A couple things I learned from CrowdStrike in June.

Fancy Bear is the supposed culprit of a phishing attack in April 2016, where credentials were stolen.
Cozy Bear attack appears much more sophisticated and was traced back to 2015 and may have been undetected for a long time.
These Russia-based attackers act independently.

In theory, the most likely leaker is Fancy Bear.

The latest attack by "Fancy Bear" has unconvincing evidence to prove similarity.

The only thing in the snort rule is commentary by Crowdstrike that it's Fancy Bear otherwise it's a super generic homing message that any unsophisticated malware is doing.
DNC & Ukraine malware's greatest similarity is effectiveness and lack of sophistication.

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Again, there is no effort to establish the link between attack and Wikileak in any of this. Are we even trying or just making noise?

On January 01 2017 12:11 mustaju wrote:

I am sincerely curious, how one would go about proving a cyber attack or connection to Wikileaks beyond deniability. If there is a methodology in place for that, I would really like to know. To clarify, I am aware that all you posted was your argument about the proof not being conclusive. I'd also be extremely content with a PM if it would derail the thread too much.

On January 01 2017 09:08 Gorsameth wrote:

The sane people are not saying that Russia hacked the elections. They are saying that Russia hacked the DNC and used wikileaks to influence the narrative.
Something many believe is not acceptable behaviour.

Dumb/Insane people will believe anything anyway.

Russian intelligence and security services have been waging a campaign of harassment and intimidation against U.S. diplomats, embassy staff and their families in Moscow and several other European capitals that has rattled ambassadors and prompted Secretary of State John F. Kerry to ask Vladimir Putin to put a stop to it.

At a recent meeting of U.S. ambassadors from Russia and Europe in Washington, U.S. ambassadors to several European countries complained that Russian intelligence officials were constantly perpetrating acts of harassment against their diplomatic staff that ranged from the weird to the downright scary. Some of the intimidation has been routine: following diplomats or their family members, showing up at their social events uninvited or paying reporters to write negative stories about them.

But many of the recent acts of intimidation by Russian security services have crossed the line into apparent criminality. In a series of secret memos sent back to Washington, described to me by several current and former U.S. officials who have written or read them, diplomats reported that Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, and then leave. One diplomat reported that an intruder had defecated on his living room carpet.

In Moscow, where the harassment is most pervasive, diplomats reported slashed tires and regular harassment by traffic police. Former ambassador Michael McFaul was hounded by government-paid protesters, and intelligence personnel followed his children to school. The harassment is not new; in the first term of the Obama administration, Russian intelligence personnel broke into the house of the U.S. defense attache in Moscow and killed his dog, according to multiple former officials who read the intelligence reports.

But since the 2014 Russian intervention in Ukraine, which prompted a wide range of U.S. sanctions against Russian officials and businesses close to Putin, harassment and surveillance of U.S. diplomatic staff in Moscow by security personnel and traffic police have increased significantly, State Department press secretary John Kirby confirmed to me.

“Since the return of Putin, Russia has been engaged in an increasingly aggressive gray war across Europe. Now it’s in retaliation for Western sanctions because of Ukraine. The widely reported harassment is another front in the gray war,” said Norm Eisen, U.S. ambassador the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014. “They are hitting American diplomats literally where they live.”

The State Department has taken several measures in response to the increased level of nefarious activity by the Russian government. All U.S. diplomats headed for Europe now receive increased training on how to handle Russian harassment, and the European affairs bureau run by Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland has set up regular interagency meetings on tracking and responding to the incidents.

McFaul told me he and his family were regularly followed and the Russian intelligence services wanted his family to know they were being watched. Other embassy officials also suffered routine harassment that increased significantly after the Ukraine-related sanctions. Those diplomats who were trying to report on Russian activities faced the worst of it.

“It was part of a way to put pressure on government officials who were trying to do their reporting jobs. It definitely escalated when I was there. After the invasion of Ukraine, it got much, much worse,” McFaul said. “We were feeling embattled out there in the embassy.”

There was a debate inside the Obama administration about how to respond, and ultimately President Obama made the decision not to respond with similar measures against Russian diplomats, McFaul said.

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington sent me a long statement both tacitly admitting to the harassment and defending it as a response to what he called U.S. provocations and mistreatment of Russian diplomats in the United States.