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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Until I hear that the code was put on the laptop by its owners intentionally and for legitimate reasons, this sounds like an attack

Nobody is disputing that. But "electric company employee's laptop gets a computer virus" is a far cry from "the Russian government is attacking our infrastructure".

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On the other hand, Stuxnet.

Are you implying that we drew first blood?

That was Iran, not Russia. But, we threw the first stone.

I think that the US govt is now throwing it's toys out of the pram because it thinks other countries (Russia) are using the same methods that the US employs to attack it's enemies and to influence the elections of other nations against them (the US). Personally I think it shows a huge degree of paranoia within the US govt, either that or it is a handy way to try and elicit support for future actions (further economic sanctions) against Russia. Especially as this comes a day after Russia brokered a peace deal in Syria, something the US could not achieve.

I saw some speculation that the DNC hack was retaliation for something the US had done previously.

Hillary Clinton is saying it was retaliation for her claiming that the Russian parliamentary elections in 2011 were rigged. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/us/politics/hillary-clinto...

I'm not saying that is true, but it does makes sense.

I made a tendentious statement, but a 5 year lag on even that seems unlikely.

Why? It seems to be an eye for an eye. 5 years is geopolitics is nothing everyone plays the long game.

Stuxnet happened. Did anything happen here? Was anything disrupted, do this look like a coordinated state actor attempt?

Russians have shut down an airliner full of people and also occupied a good chunk of Ukraine and there was less hoopla in the media about it. Someone finds a PHP shell on a laptop and Washington Post is going nuts with "OMG Russians are about to disable our power grid".

If this is not Fake News then I don't know what is...

Was WaPo a respectable news outlet at some point? I feel like it was, I wasn't following it much before. It has gone the way of Fox News it seems recently. Oh well..

> If this is not Fake News then I don't know what is...

Obamaism, the McCarthyism of the 21st century. Otherwise known as good old propaganda. It goes like: Russia hacked the election, Russia hacked our grid, Donald Trump is a in fact Russian robot programmed to win the US elections and destroy America, etc.

Except it isn't. I love how some people seem to deliberately confuse an ineffectual technocrat with an evil dictatorial left-wing conspiracy leader pretending to be an ineffectual technocrat.

Just because they failed doesn't mean it wasn't an attack.

We're about 1000 miles from being able to say they even attempted anything. That's the point here.

> this sounds like an attack

>> Nobody is disputing that

>>> Just because they failed doesn't mean it wasn't an attack

Nobody is disputing that. What's being disputed is (a) the target and (b) the attacker.

If malware on a computer with a completely unknown origin is now considered a "Russian attack", I don't even know what to say. Words have no meaning any more.

They specifically identified the malware as being from Grizzly Steppe. It wasn't just off the shelf.

In your GP comment, "they" referred to the Russians, but isn't "Grizzly Steppe" a collective term invented by the US?

"Grizzly Steppe" is the US intelligence codename for an operation they believe that the Russian intelligence service executed.

So it sounds as though the reasoning is circular.

It is circular, but who's going to notice? We went to war in Iraq with the same quality of argument, sound reasoning is sadly not a per-requisite for war.

That's not circular. They're saying the DNC and Vermont hacks had the same signature and are independently saying that signature is tied to Russia.

> saying that signature is tied to Russia

What do "signature" and "tied to" mean in this context?

It's not completely unknown origin, it's been tied back to a group that the US government has separately identified as Russian intelligence.

You are very wrong about this

Stuxnet happened in a very similar way

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