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Comment by just_steve_h | Hacker News Reader

So far I've seen ZERO EVIDENCE. Reuters and the Washington Post have breathless claims of Russian hackers "according to officials familiar with the matter." Uh huh.

Saying "APT29" or "CozyBear" doesn't make the accusation any more credible.

If multiple US agencies are trumpeting the same story, you really must ask yourself "Why? Why this? Why now?"

It's pretty amusing, in a depressing way, to see how quickly so many otherwise intelligent people can be made to snap to attention and fight the Russian Menace with a few anonymous government claims.

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We've got like 12 years of historical records tracking the evolution of internal tooling and infrastructure that Cozy Bear uses. Yeah attribution is hard, yeah someone could have been trying to frame them, but in general these groups tend to use a lot of in-house tools and consistent infrastructure and techniques.

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

Did you read the Fancy Bear incitements for the DNC hack?

https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download

The evidence was absolutely overwhelming. It isn't like someone saw an IP in Russia and assumed it must be Russians. The intelligence agencies had been tracking them for years. They knew exactly who was doing exactly what within the Fancy Bear organization. They know when people joined up and how they were introduced to their GRU handlers. The idea that these attributions are just thrown around whimsically is pure ignorance.

Here's the article I was trying to remember last night about how Dutch intelligence actually hacked security cameras and watched the DNC hack go down live.

(source) https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2213767-dutch-intelligence-...

(summary) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dutch-intelligence-us-fbi-russi...

Misattributions happen, but Fancy Bear / Cozy Bear is extremely well understood, and they don't generally make much of an effort to hide the fact that it was them that did it. For them, it's often about sending a message.

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...

Why are there so many people who absolutely deny Russia does any hacking.

It's always some big conspiracy theory that multiple cyber security agencies, all the three letter agencies, and multiple news agencies are in on.

I'd bring up tin foil hats, but nowadays we can make fabric faraday cages so we can all be fashionable no matter what we believe.

> Why are there so many people who absolutely deny Russia does any hacking.

Because there are many people paid to do so. (and soon if not already automated bots).

Not everyone who questions something is a paid shill.

The beauty, from a nefarious standpoint, is that you don't have to pay people to spread disinformation. You just have to use the right psych techniques on them and ensure they get proper reinforcement.

These are the techniques that have turned my family and many of their friends (and clearly a measurable percentage of Americans) into the exact opposite of the values they taught me and demonstrated for decades.

They truly believe virtually anything spoken by people like Limbaugh, Glenn, Orielly, Carlson, etc.

If you try to use some logic or evidence, even showing two conflicting statements made by one of those idols, they just shut down. The cognitive dissonance is too uncomfortable.

You might want to explain who Limbaugh, Glenn, Orielly, Carlson etc are for those of use outside of the US bubble

I'm curious, are people saying that "Russia doesn't do any hacking" or that "there isn't yet enough evidence that this specific attack is by Russia". Those are two very different claims.

I don't think there's any doubt about the former claim, personally. The latter though, I think it's too early to tell, especially since we've seen recently how certain hackers have explicitly started putting bait signs from other nation-states to misdirect.

> The latter though, I think it's too early to tell, especially since we've seen recently how certain hackers have explicitly started putting bait signs from other nation-states to misdirect.

Has there been any indication at all that it was Russia in particular? A lot of people believe it was a state-level attacker based on the sophistication of the attack, but even conceding that doesn't make Russia the only alternative.

He's not denying Russia does hacking. He's saying there is no evidence that ties this to Russia over any other group. Maybe Russia is most likely based on priors, but I don't think the average HN commenter has an accurate estimate of nation-state hacking frequencies.

"Attribution is hard."

Sometimes it seems there's a related law that has replaced the one you cite: "When in doubt, blame Russia."

> some big conspiracy theory that multiple cyber security agencies, all the three letter agencies, and multiple news agencies are in on.

So...Operation Mockingbird?

This isn't the only area where otherwise sane, normal people seem to have lost their minds. There's a term from a few years ago - "Foxbrain".

Russians do a lot of hacking. It doesnt mean its the government or any official body, though. The non-stop, partially unfounded russia bashing and excessive repeated sanctioning is pissing off a LOT of highly skilled russian programmers.

I dont think the russian goverment is behind most attacks.

Krebs: Update, 8:30 p.m. ET: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that FireEye attributed the SolarWinds attack to APT29. That information has been removed from the story.

Given the scope of this product — basically everyone runs it — any chance that this is some sort of hoax will be mitigated by the “too large to be a hoax” thing. Probably some sort of fallacy whose name I don’t know.

See: moon landing. Of course we went to the moon otherwise, what, 50,000 people are keeping a perfect and scandalous secret for half a century?

The best proof that the United States went to the Moon is that there was extensive Russian spying going on at the time, but Russia never claimed that the US was lying about the Apollo program.

The best proof that we went to the moon is that we left mirrors there that we use to bounce lasers off of to detect the distance to the moon.

That's difficult for people with poor science educations to fully grasp. For example, they might think that the moon's surface itself could reflect the laser light, etc...

Not to mention that unmanned probes could also have placed reflectors without humans ever being sent to the Moon!

Why even go to those lengths? If they lied about the moon landing surely they are lying about lasers even hitting the moon, or it not being made of cheese...

Just 2 points to add here:

Scientists have reflected lasers just off the surface, and there are unmanned probes (Russian ones) that placed reflectors on the moon.

But the point should still be that, if anyone cares to learn about the difference, and how we know the difference between all these different types of reflectors, that information is freely available and could easily be understood by most people.

Given your use of "breathless" and "Russian Menace", it's clear which echo chamber you spend time in.

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