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Comment by vxxzy | Hacker News Reader

What would be the advantage to making your exploits appear to come from other countries? What do we gain from this? It feels like an instigation.

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There is a huge advantage to do that. False flag attacks are one of the tried and true methods of intelligence agencies since ancient times.

For example the official pretext for WWII was started as a false flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident US did it at the start of Vietnam War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

We gain a lot from this. We can for example manufacture "Russian hysteria" - "Look we found a Russian rootkit on a DNC server". We can attack our allies and then make it look like the Chinese did it, and so on. It is immensely useful.

one powerful tool in our arsenal, then. Sounds like something that could foster world wars :)

Someone benefits, but it is not "we"

>"Look we found a Russian rootkit on a DNC server"

Implying a 'Russian rootkit' was planted in a false flag operation?

So the CIA pretended to be Russia helping to get Trump elected -- why?

Did they pretend to be Russia? I didn't see any evidence. They seemed to have heavily invested in this capability though. Why waste time and money if they don't plan on using it?

Why do you think they might want to pretend to be someone else?

Guaranteed Victory? If Hillary won, they win. If she loses, they get Trump impeached, and they win.

Well this is the CIA.

It can confuse the attribution so that trust is spoiled, so that energy is spend uselessly, so that another country takes the blame, for false flag attacks to justify other strategic moves.

Doesn't necessarily have to be instigation -- could just be misdirection. If you're targeting Russians, then making malware that looks like Russian hackers seems like a no brainer, if you don't want to attract attention from intelligence services.

Especially when you, or a partner service of yours, has access to compromised servers from that region to spread said malware from a server that can be attributed to "the bad guys™".

Like it's the case with the NSA: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3137065/security/shadow-...

Misleading information is a weapon in any nation's arsenal. I have to say I'm a little taken aback and almost feel like your comment might be trolling.

I dont actually see anything in this that would indicate they could do that or that they wanted to. It appears to be 100% conjecture from Wikileaks.

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