Can someone explain how individuals are identified when we are talking about state sponsored hackers?
> As The New York Times reported last October, Cyber Command operators sent direct messages to individual Russian staffers that they had identified as involved in election interference, and were tracking their activity. The Post reports that the IRA was troubled enough by those messages that they launched an internal investigation to identify potential leakers.
I have a feeling that the US and allied countries are pretty deep into the Russians with this stuff.
It's a super-organization that transcends what we think of elsewhere as being different sectors (of varying degrees of legality)
These are completely different things, it's downright silly to imply otherwise.
IRA staffers certainly aren't "GRU agents"
But nothing you say argues against what I said.
Also, there have been cases where authorities have been 'subcontracting' certain services or tools from local cyber criminals working on online financial fraud - where those criminals were later arrested abroad, and have agreed to testify against their former partners/employers.
CIA likely has human assets within the ranks of the military intelligence units that could provide information or details of written documents.
also google location services might have some data on them too
Meanwhile, the Dutch secret service AIVD had access to GRU HQ camera feeds.
Before all that happened a high ranking Russian police officer got reprimanded (IIRC send to gulag) for working together with the Dutch police on high level cyber crime.