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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

So, am I reading this right? the Russian government had the ability to impersonate the credentials of ANYONE in the marjoity of the fortune 500, the US Government, the US DOD, and our telecomm infrastructure... and they likely had this access for a while.

How is this NOT an act of war?

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Well, that is very similar to asking how it is that conventional spying is not an act of war. It isn't, because everyone is going to be doing it anyway, so if you make that an act of war we have war all the time, rather than nations not doing it.

So it's an act of war. Now what?

Does the US escalate to a shooting war with the second biggest nuclear power in the world?

So it's not surprising Russia thinks they can act with a lot of impunity without facing catastrophic consequences.

US imposed individual sanctions and explicitly named hackers from the GRU after the DOD investigated 2016 election hacking, effectively authorizing their arrest if stepping on western soil. This will be handled diplomatically through the State Dept. first. There is little incentive to starting a war with Russia I don't think.

I may be wrong, but I thought members of the security apparatus weren't allowed to leave the country in Russia? I may be horrendously wrong, but I thought someone mentioned that when these sanctions came out about Guccifer 2 and such.

There are ways for US to retaliate through espionage, such as doing a mass round up of minor russian spy assets that usually aren't worth the effort to go after, going after russian operations in places in which neither country have jurisdiction in, exposing blackmail of some random oligarch, stirring up unrest with plausible deniability, etc.

Essentially make life difficult for the people who actually run Russia.

You risk destroying your leverage if you do this, but some partial retaliation is indeed a good idea. It might be the case that those avenues for retaliation are already almost saturated.

We can try sanctions, but we've pretty much maxed out that route after the Crimea annexation.

If we do nothing, we're sending the message that these actions are okay.

The US Government does stuff like this to other countries all. the. time.

We don't hear about it much. But if this is an "act of war" the US has conducted dozens of these kinds of "attacks" on others over the last ten or fifteen years.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon [0]

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Countdown-Zero-Day-Stuxnet-Digital-eb...

>If we do nothing, we're sending the message that these actions are okay.

I think it sends the message that these actions won’t trigger nuclear war. How would you even get public support for war with Russia?

We aren’t even close to maxing out what could be accomplished with economic sanctions! The US and Russia still have a direct trading relationship!

Maybe we should "send the message" that we won't install insecure shit on our networks?

no... nuclear war before free software.

Microsoft’s rejected new slogan.

Does anyone believe the US isn’t doing similar shit themselves ? In that light it seems pretty disingenuous to call out others for the same act.

One of the shortcoming of maximalist position, you lost your leverage.

Did you also consider this[0] an act of war?

[0] (U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid) [ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-r... ]

That was retaliatory. We're already in a war.

Am I missing something? Why is everyone so sure that it is Russia? Are they the only ones with access to computers beside US?

Because Russia has somewhat of an oil monopoly in Europe and the US doesn't like that. We've been being fed Russia war propaganda for at least a decade. If it even feels like a "Russia kind of thing" to the general public that is just the result of intentional conditioning by warmongers.

It could have been literally any major world power, including our allies. No evidence has been presented whatsoever as to who the culprit is.

Hell, it could be a different part of the USA government, like those "sonic embassy attacks" were.

What? are you implying that the US government perpetrated attacks on US gov personnel?

the amount of insane unfounded crap posted in HN comments is growing and i'm not sure if there is a fix.

BTW recent articles say it's microwaves

Yes, one must see the most recent coverage to know the current story. ISTR someone had retired from CIA and was shopping a memoir around; apparently the only exploit he could mention on the record was that one time he got sick. Just his bad luck that in late 2020 we're mostly thinking about a different illness.

The only common element among USA facilities in Havana, Guangzhou, and Tashkent is the USA facilities themselves. Much like the situation described in TFA, those facilities were built by the most corrupt bidders. It will surprise no one when it is revealed that some corner was cut, and American personnel were exposed to harmful amounts of some ghastly chemicals, radiations, etc.

It is literally a conspiracy theory to reject this simplest possible explanation in favor of some outlandish three-way joint venture among the Cubans, the Chinese, and the Uzbeks, three nations not known for ever having done anything together.

Or that foreign agents can roam basically freely in those (and basically all) countries?

I'm totally on board with accident/malpractice from shitty construction.

But implying or outright saying the CIA used a weapon on their own employees is crazy - without actual proof - especially to write out on HN.

Sure as pointed out below the US has done - and probably is - doing stupid things. But I really don't buy testing a WEAPON without consent

I don't know about jessaustin's claims, but it definitely isn't beyond a US government agency to attack its own personnel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiki_Camarena

You pretty much glossed over the whole Crimea thing in Europe. When has the US or the EU annexed part of a country in recent years?

We don't annex. We just keep murdering your ruler until you find one that does what we say. We came, we saw, he died.

Because it definitely couldn’t be China or any other country.

Couldn't be china, they can't access the outside world ;)

Psychological conditioning is my theory. If you think about it, has this not been a rather popular news item for many years? If people should not get their perception of world affairs from the news, then from where should they get it?

Don't you know? Liberals automatically blame Russia. Conservatives automatically blame China. Me, I Blame Canada. Damn you, Gordon Lightfoot!

We (the public) have not been provided evidence that this was Russia. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Some anonymous people claimed it's Russia. That is meaningless.

It's from sources vetted by Reuters. Their public-facing anonymity was required for coming forward.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-cyber-treasury-exclus...

This may have been a valid assertion in a time where news media could be trusted

I, and many others, no longer have any faith or trust in the news media. Time and time again the news media has been caught spreading lies and disinformation so sorry I am no longer going to "take their word" for it, and trust they have properly vetted their sources

Also They do not lead themselves to credibility by having a Matrix style photo with "hooded hacker" trope prominent in the article

Criticizing a stock photo is addressing the tone, not the content.

Your distrust is misplaced because it's been confirmed by multiple people in the government now.

Right, so anonymous sources who provided no evidence to the public. It's meaningless.

The sources are not anonymous to Reuters and they were authoritative enough in the matter to publish. It is not meaningless.

Do you remember when a named source, Colin Powell, showed some photoshops of "weapons lab trucks" to the UN leading to us going to war in multiple countries resulting in millions of dead people? That was a named person with claimed evidence. This is even less credible than Powell.

It's hard to get less credible than unnamed sources with no evidence.

As I'm forced to speculate, because it is inconvenient for us to call it an act of war. We routinely conduct cyber espionage missions on other countries and "probe" their cyber defenses. If we were to call this an all out act of war, then we would also be found guilty of unprovoked acts of war on many other countries, including allied countries. So, too, would many other countries. This is the new spywork.

Lmao act of war. You going to fight?

This is just what countries do to eachother. Welcome to the 21st century.

It is appalling how so many people seem to have such little regard for what the consequences of the next "war to end all wars" would be.

And 20th, 19th, 18th, etc. The methods change, the spying is constant.

If it wasn't Russia (and the evidence supporting that it was hasn't been released yet) it would be literally anyone else. North Korea. Iran. Even our allies. Some 400lb dude sitting in his parents basement in New Jersey. And the US is doing this, or attempting to do this, to many other countries.

Ultimately, the hack is the practical responsibility of the victim.

Don't fall for the Kissinger style war mongering.

Having the capacity isn’t an act of war, in the same way that having the much more significant capacity to obliterate major population centers isn’t.

How the capacity is applied may be another story.

If you had an experince of an actual war, you would NOT have asked this question.

And how many such tools have been employed by CIA? So are all the other countries supposed to wage war against US? Govt's all over the world do shady shit, constantly. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes they dont. Men in power use tensions to stay in power, waging wars against more powerful/equal, wont help men in power neither of the sides.

> How is this NOT an act of war?

Because spying is not an act of war.

If it was, the entire world would be at war with the entire world.

> How is this NOT an act of war?

So you want bombing to start over this? I don't.

Anyone calling for war between the the largest nuclear power and second-largest nuclear power is insane or ignorant. To even suggest something like that is obscene given the incomprehensible loss of life it would entail. I think most people who can remember it would agree that it's a good thing the Cold War stayed cold.

How is this NOT an act of war?

Very simply because it's not an act anyone would initiate armed conflict over.

According to Charles Carmakal, senior vice president and chief technical officer at Mandiant, FireEye’s incident response arm

“There will unfortunately be more victims that have to come forward in the coming weeks and months,” he said. While some have attributed the attack to a state-sponsored Russian group known as APT 29, or Cozy Bear, FireEye had not yet seen sufficient evidence to name the actor, he said. A Kremlin official denied that Russia had any involvement.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-15/fireeye-s...

Because hacking isn’t considered an act of war. If they turned off our infrastructure that is an act of war because it would have caused material harm.

Are you personally willing to go to war? Are you willing to be a foot soldier? Do you wish to kill? Do you wish to be killed?

I do not want to go to war over this, and generally I have friends from a number of countries in the east but make no mistake: if my country asks me to defend its borders or even NATO borders I'll be there[1], even if it is many years since I finished draft and I know have a family. The alternative will probably be worse.

Anyways, no sane, decent person should wish a war.

[1]: I am a whole lot less interested in defending us around the middle East and in Afghanistan though.

Tense is wrong, they have this ability RIGHT NOW to a very high degree of certainty.

Just because the tip of the iceberg has been discovered doesn't mean its mitigated. Even Fireeye is probably still compromised. It will take a while to understand the actual scope of this.

And in the meantime new attacks are likely happening also.

Hopefully they'll find out some horrible things that our public servan^Wmasters are doing, and leak it to Wikileaks... where have I heard that before?

Everyone country does this to every other country that they can. Not like the US doesn't (or at least try to) pull off stuff like this too. So if it's an act of war then every major power has pretty much at some point declared war on every other major power, even allies.

Digital war? Sure. We are probably hitting back right now. Traditional war? I hope not. 1) I don't have enough bottle caps saved up. and 2) in all seriousness, most humans would not survive WW3, not even those with bunkers.

If the U.S. didn’t go to war over Crimea why would they go to war over this?

Because Crimea is another country/outside of usa jurisdiction? Whereas this is a direct attack to USA institutions/government.

This isn’t an attack _yet_. This is potentially a part of the process of developing the capabilities for a later attack.

Crimea is the first time a nation state has meaningfully changed its borders that I know of since WW2. As a result I would consider Crimea a much more egregious attack on American values and western interests than a software vulnerability that hasn’t been leveraged to cause actual harm.

> Crimea is the first time a nation state has meaningfully changed its borders that I know of since WW2.

I took a look out of curiosity, and there have been a lot more border changes in the world than I was expecting. Lots due to decolonization in Africa. The partition of India in 1947 was huge. Lots of European changes, of course. Many small border cleanups. The changes go on for page.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_border_change... (That page is since WWI, so skip to 1945.)

Russia has a policy where they allow "patriotic hackers" to operate freely while turning a blind eye to their actions. The Kremlin even mentioned this in their disavowal.

While I disagree with the claim that merely having the capacity is an act of war, doing something that would be an act of war through privateers rather than official state forces doesn’t make it any less an act of war than it otherwise would be.

Don't worry, you'll get your war.

The US executive branch is favourable to Russian interference. They're invited

Even potentially affected our election infrastructure:

https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1338708743782092800

Edit: Had a thought - Since the NetFlow Traffic Analyzer tool stores historical network traffic data, I wonder if Dominion traffic was pulled before the breach was closed.

Significant after Chris Krebs testified to Congress that Dominion machines were connected to the internet.

The entire Trump administration's been an act of war. They got classified intel, private phone calls with the president, numerous concessions, everything they could have possibly wanted in terms of foreign policy, including an abrupt and chaotic withdrawal from Syria where Russian troops literally took over American bases, and a significant number of GOP congressional representatives visiting Moscow on July 4th together, with no American press there to cover the event or tell us who they met with, what they discussed, or why they went.

There's also evidence that Russia infiltrated the Treasury in 2015, unrelated to the election interference afterwards.

It's been war for a long time, and we have not been winning.

On the plus side, no actual wars were started or joined. Like Jimmy Carter.

If it were Iran, Turkey, etc the missiles would already be in the air

It is an act of war. Be suspect of anyone downplaying.

That's what all the SolarWinds people are saying!

It is. Hope, after new administration takes office, "hell sanctions" package would be approved, as well as closing Russian embassies and increasing military pressure to its borders. Sanctions already work, and Russian regime does not enjoy a variety of options to oppose it.

> the Russian government

You sure about that? "They" have been claiming Russia is the boogie man for years, but it's never been proven. In this case, it does appear like a complex hack. Wouldn't be surprised if it's China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, U.S. Government (yes, hacking itself), etc.

Who is "they"? And what hasn't been proven, are you referring to Russian interference in 2016?

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