US Govt Data Shows Russia Used Outdated Ukrainian PHP Malware

If there were security holes in such a high profile organization, I would assume multiple intelligence agencies may have made interceptions of the data.

The US intercepts communications of even friendly foreign governments, it certainly should be expected that a hostile government is going to try to intercept communications of the US government and related private organizations.

If Julian Assange is to be believed, which I think is fair, my guess is Russia hacked the DNC and RNC, yet the DNC dump came from someone else, internal or external.

Everything about the Russia stories are reminding me of a few years ago when ever hack was caused by China. Of course, because hackers are routing traffic through China and thats where the trail ended!

I've written this here before, but while there is the appearance that the United States Government is unified and trying to do one thing, this is not the case. There are specific individuals, within places such as the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency, who have very intentional strategies and agendas which in some cases are totally at odds with the Department of Defense or the Department of Justice. They have done enough to keep long, multi-Presidential administration careers and gain influence in those organizations while avoid being ousted, but they are wielding outsized influence on US foreign policy.

If one tries to explain what the US is doing without acknowledging or understanding the strong opposing forces within the US government, things start sounding really wacky. Most certainly others within the US government including elected officials are guilty of this too, at least in their public statements (which like propaganda can have long term destructive counter-effect of eventually causing the majority of your supporters to fight for made up stories rather than what you were originally intending to do.)

Why? He already has a distain against the US and Clinton. He has no more reason to tell the truth the the state players do.

> Comneys email announcement at the 11th hour about reopening email investigation was probably a deciding variable and that was hardly Russian lead.

This I completely agree with. I think the DNC leaks may have impacted a hundredth of a percent, but Comney contributed in a tenth of a precent. Why would he not intervene? He was almost certainly aware that he would have been job hunting shortly after a Clinton win. He already has shown us his true nature in the whole Apple phone mess which really was more a litmus test then trying to gather real intelligence.

Still at the same time if indeed we had foreign actors engaged in election manipulation that is something we, nor any nation, should not tolerate. And yes we should also look inward as I am fairly certain that we have been guilty of this in the past.

Maybe, although I doubt this is enough, we and others can quit this ongoing manipulation. The US has proved it backfires multiple times in the middle east. Other nations can hopefully learn from our mistakes. I almost hate to bring it up, but.. "Why can't we all just get along". The answer is simple in that folks want to keep jobs and power.

> I'm no expert and just wonder why countries can put more effort to looking after their own populations needs.

If they did then that reduces the fear of those against us. That fear seems to be the driving force of politics in 2016 globally.

Using Mind Control to make Debbie Wasserman Schultz quit as DNC chair for rigging thr Primaries and then same day get a new job with HRC was genius hacking.

It's like poeple think the only thing shady was Comey the Weasel!

If Trump had done basic things like released his tax returns (to show no massive conflict of interest with Russian loans etc) or stopped praising Putin on a regular basis then it would be a lot easier to dismiss concerns about his relationship with Putin and whether they stand to benefit by Trump's election.

Russia/Putin has a history of crushing domestic political dissent (including assassinations) and exploiting xenophobia for political gain. There is NOTHING for the US or any NATO member to admire about Putin or the Russian political system.

Edit. I forgot to mention the proxy war in Syria! Russia has everything to gain by tipping the scales in favour of a politician that upsets that status quo in the US.

And please remember why Russia's relations with almost all of the world deteriorated in the first place. It's because they annexed Crimea (unprecedented for our generation) and allowed soldiers and weapons to flood into Ukraine which then resulted in Flight 117 being shot down.

Nobody is looking for a fight with Russia but capitulating and doing nothing is not an answer either. Diplomatic sanctions have been the correct response and I don't see anyone asking for an escalation of that.

Just an observation: I don't recall until very recently the DNC or the RNC to refer to the parties, as opposed to the Democratic Party or Republican Party. I wonder why the shift? The focus on the Podesta/DNC emails? Makes sense during the election, and now it seems to have transferred over to referring to the party as part of the government (e.g., in reference to the FBI or DHS). Last time I remember the DNC being mentioned so much by name was during the Bill Clinton campaigns, in contrast to the Democratic Leadership Council. My memory can be faulty and selective, so I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this as well. (Anyone else remember Sinbad in Shazam?)

Inasmuch as it's a guide for other agencies, they'd be better served by OWASP recommendations. It's not clear what anyone could do with a report like this. I don't see any great takeaways that one could add to the next revision of their STIG. There are no 0-days for an IAVA.

As long as we're going for pure speculation, I think that Kim Dotcom hired Ukranian hackers and I could potentially find weak circumstantial evidence by going through a timeline of his Tweets. I seem to remember that he had foreknowledge of some of the items to be leaked, though that could've been pure BS and I didn't really investigate it at the time. He also has motive based on this administration's treatment of him.

EDIT: Found it -

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-14/kim-d...

lets unpack this statement though: However, electronic records, perhaps more than any records, lend themselves to being faked.

It is certainly true that someone can edit and change electronic records and the tampering of such records, unless explicitly protected against, can be made indistinguishable from untampered records. But what is much more difficult is to tamper with records from a wide variety of unrelated sources to show the same thing.

For example, it is certainly possible for me to construct a record that says my "source IP" is KREMVAX[1] and to even have the source IP "logged" at the destination site as the origination point. But it is not possible for me to easily alter the s-flow records at Cogent which shows that the packet originated on a port on a router which is sitting in California. Yes, I can by a VPS in the Ukraine using bitcoin that has gone through several mixers but I cannot completely erase all of the packet sources that lead to that VPS. Yes, I can build an "IP over DNS" tunnel to disguise my traffic to the VPS as "harmless" DNS traffic but I cannot disguise how those DNS packets are propagated in the larger web.

The point I'm trying to make is that if you are a state actor (like the 17 intelligence agencies of the US) and the events leave traces (which they do), it is entirely feasible to unwind packet traces, money paths, and network events to the exact origin point. I was at Google when they Chinese did it to Google and got to watch on the sidelines the amazing amount of resource that could be brought to bear on the problem. And what it more, that incident and others less well publicized have lead to still more infrastructure which is completely passive and observational and captures all packet flows and meta data.

As a result, I find it completely believable that the origin of those attacks can be identified with certainty.

I believe it is reasonable to be skeptical about motivations and or command chain that lead to the attacks.

[1] A stand in for some IP Block allocated to Russia

The war is also known under other names, such as the Persian Gulf War, First Gulf War, Gulf War I, Kuwait War, First Iraq War, or Iraq War before the term "Iraq War" became identified instead with the 2003 Iraq War

The point is the 2003 coalition invasion isn't referred to as the First Iraq War; if using that term, it's commonly understood to mean the events of 1991. I could have phrased it better as "What's commonly referred to by the first Iraq War would be following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990."

Thanks for those tweets, yes, he has done a lot of things that make him at least suspicious. I wouldn't take him seriously at all if not for the fact that he predicted some of this.

Incidentally, for those mentioning McAfee, I see no reason to take that guy seriously, nor am I presently aware of him displaying any foreknowledge of any of this.