Justice Department charging Russian spies and criminal hackers in Yahoo intrusion
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is why the FBI not engaging in their own grey-area shady offensive cyber techniques is so important, if they plan on making statements like these and expect to be taken seriously. Even if the FBI always find ways to get away with it legally, it still doesn't help their case when claiming moral high ground.
There is nothing Russia loves better than to dismiss claims against them because the US does it too - and the Russian public eats this "US double standard" up every time. They just see what Russia does as more explicit. Without giving Russia this easy out I don't see how enforcement like this is going to be effective. They show no signs of slowing down. Unless some new sanctions are planned?
Finding legal avenues instead of hiring shady Russian criminal hackers might seem like a big difference but the end results are hard to distinguish.
Last week the FBI let a pedophile who ran a hugely popular darknet CP site go instead of revealing the full details of their own hacking: https://www.wired.com/2017/03/feds-rather-drop-child-porn-ca...
Consistency really does matter...
Unfortunately, like biological weapons, these techniques don't go back in the box very easily. We're entering an era where economic and political sabotage by hostile intelligence agencies - in both directions, and occasionally between "allies" or even in the same country - is becoming increasingly common.
Except maybe having an opponent that doesn't keep up. I agree the US should not run itself as an imperium, but to expect any country not to have an espionage program is absurd. Countries engage in espionage for the same reason that they have military forces - if they don't, someone will take advantage of the fact and they won't be able to do anything about it.
There's a new Russian term for this phenomenon. "Reverse cargo cult".
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/5rtznu/idioma_expla...
You can't really compare hacking suspected pedophiles to hacking yahoo.
That's why the FBI made changes to their procedural rules at the start of this year saying they could hack anyone who obscures their point of origin. Now they can get a single warrant and hack millions of people with it and it's still "okay".
To be clear: they weren't just hacking "suspected pedophiles". They were hacking a huge population of people then sorting through after. Just like an attack on yahoo.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/fbi-hacked-over-8...
> Consistency really does matter...
It does. That's why the U.S. has stopped calling out China on its human rights abuses, for instance.
What interests me is how the public is somehow more inclined to specifically confront Russia when both effectively undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of liberal democracies.
I find it interesting, that every mention of a double standard here is to lament the fact that the US is being called out on it. Not the fact, that the US in engaging in it.
When you do something questionable, and then try to shame others for doing the same, it is a double standard.
An important difference from hypocrisy is that, with a double standard, the group that is judging in an unfair way is typically itself not engaging in the behavior being judged. For instance, an interviewer might have a double standard for male and female job applicants who have a certain kind of black mark on their record (or a certain kind of mark of excellence for that matter), but the interviewer is not a job applicant at all, let alone one with this kind of black mark.
Another difference is that with hypocrisy the underlying behavior being judged has to be something bad, and accusing an accuser of hypocrisy is no real defense. (However, hypocrites often profess exaggerated standards of morality, and the best solution may be for everyone to just moralize less on the particular thing they are on about, so accusing an accuser of hypocrisy can be at least part of a defense.)
The original comment isn't exclusively lamenting the double standard, it is saying we shouldn't do it so the double standard can't be applied.
So, yes, dear american attorney, it's all quite sad. These counter-intelligence officers not only hacked yahoo, but their own government as well.
My guess is that they were grunts serving one of the power blocks within Kremlin. Hence the leaks targeting certain Kremlin officials, and not others. That's why they were safe for so long.
Another funny bit you can read between the lines, is that when the Americans tracked them down, they probably tried to recruit them as their own spies within the FSB. Or at least ferret out as much info as they could, probably in exchange for a sweeter deal back in the US. And that's when the Russian counter-intelligence decided to pull the plug. Hence, you see them being arrested primarily for "treason and colluding with the FBI", rather than the Shaltai-Boltai leaks.
>Dokuchaev, whose hacker alias was “Forb,” was arrested in December in Moscow, according to the news agency Interfax, on charges of state treason for passing information to the CIA. He had reportedly agreed to work for the FSB to avoid prosecution for bank card fraud.
The interesting bit here is that Dokuchaev is a part of Humpty Dumpty (Shaltai-Boltai) saga:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/a-shakeup-in-russias-top...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-30/how-russi...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38930627
https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/tinker-tailor-hacker-spy...
Just curious as to why these hackers are competent enough to hack multi-billion dollar industries but not competent enough to at least hide their employer if not themselves?
The prosecutors and agencies involved can only string together evidence in an attempt to convince a non-technical jury (or tribunal) to see things that aren't there explicitly, but could be implied.
For example, a machine with photos of me and some of my financial documents might be used to hack someone, and my MAC address and IP show up in the "hacking evidence".
Depending on how motivated the prosecutors are to charge me personally, you will either see me in trouble, or you won't. In my opinion, if you aren't politically well connected, your ability to evade indictments and eventually convictions is non existent in the face of someone as powerful as the DOJ
Are you saying that in the case of this Yahoo hack, this is the evidence that has been obtained? Or is this a general link about what authorities are able to do?
Because if so, then yes, I personally would say this is enough to reach a guilty verdict. They deserve it if they were dumb enough to show their face and receive on the books payment from a shady authority.
But too often, someone's machine is implicated with the kind of flakey technical evidence that is used to extort a confession or a plea bargain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_intelligence_(intelligen...
A failure to hack is almost always going to be just... a failure to hack. A failure to turn an asset or a turned asset... yikes.
> a court of appeals in Washington D.C. ruled that an American citizen can't sue the Ethiopian government for hacking into his computer and monitoring him with spyware. "The decision on Tuesday is a blow to anti-surveillance and digital rights activists who were hoping to establish an important precedent in a widely documented case of illegitimate government-sponsored hacking."
Thus, courts generally decline to hear those cases. Governments are held to have 'sovereign immunity' and indeed most countries offer no way to sue a foreign government in their own courts.
Twisted world.
> "You tried to hide from us, but not only do we know it was you, we also know exactly which operative did it. We have fully infiltrated your intel agency, you might as well give up now".
Oh and employing criminals as officers FFS Beria must be spinning in his grave at that incompetence
There are some rather interesting nuggets of information in it.
Even if you entertain the possibility that the two acted on their own, you can't admit it to the public. Admitting that two of your own officer ran roughshod over you is too embarrassing. In the prosecution, the authorities will probably rely on the American angle (they tried to sell our secrets to the FBI, but we caught them).