Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C | Hacker News Reader

Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked D.N.C

nytimes.com

31 pointstlrobinson9 comments

I can easily imagine that state hackers in Russia would want to penetrate the DNC. It's full of great political information on one of their rivals.

Releasing it? I'm not sure if that is traditional spy craft.

Julian Assange has hinted that the WikiLeaks dump was originally sourced from an insider.

It's not impossible that BOTH narratives are true.

Conspiracy theories:

I'm not entirely convinced that it was Russia. They point to an IP address that is a proxy server in Russia. If it was Russia, wouldn't they put the proxy server in another jurisdiction to throw people off the trail?

> If it was Russia, wouldn't they put the proxy server in another jurisdiction to throw people off the trail?

Maybe. Or maybe they don't care, because they expect a Trump administration would be lenient on them for some reason.

What other evidence was there besides the IP address of the proxy in Russia? The NYTimes articles provides sources but no actual evidence in their articule.

> Releasing it?

Why not. Governments hack each other to get an edge. Sometimes to just know what is going on, sometimes for silent diplomatic 'cheating'. And if they think they would benefit, I am quite sure its not above Putin to release it for propaganda reasons.

Excerpt from the article:

The Crowdstrike report ... concludes that the Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., entered the committee’s networks last summer.

The G.R.U., a competing, military intelligence unit, was a later arrival. Investigators believe it is the G.R.U. that has played a bigger role in releasing the emails.

(end of quote)

One has to wonder: who else was wandering through the DNC's computers?

The emails only confirm what everyone already knew. It was like Snowden, a shock only to those who weren't paying attention.

>One has to wonder: who else was wandering through the DNC's computers?

China. Saudi Arabia. Turkey. North Korea.

>But intelligence officials have cautioned that they are uncertain whether the electronic break-in at the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage — of the kind the United States also conducts around the world — or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.

Does this bother anyone else? I appreciate that the NYTimes is willing to print an admission that the US also plays rough in cyberspace, but only probably because public awareness of this already exists. It appears as an attempt to setup the possibility that this hack was not "fairly routine cyberespionage which the US also does" which is apparently OK, according to the NYTimes, but as possibly some other type of malicious hacking.

So what they're saying is: Nation state hacking is OK, as long as it abides by some untold, arbitrary guidelines, but we're not sure yet as journalists yet how to spin this any further.

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