GRIZZLY STEPPE – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity

originally posted by: DJW001
a reply to: CIAGypsy

First of all, everyone in the world has "motive" to back one candidate or another. If you think Russia is the only one, then you have not be an active party to the politics of the world, ever.

Not everyone in the world has the ability to hack into other people's emails. If this were a leak, the leaker would only have leaked incriminating documents, not page after page of press clippings. The volume of these emails seems designed to overwhelm, making the fact that there is nothing incriminating about them difficult to spot, while rinforcing the narrative that "where there's smoke there must be fir." There was neither smoke nor fire. This strategy is not one that a High School prankster would employ, either. A prankster would would make indiscriminate hacks and dump them all at once, the only intent being to demonstrate their prowess.

It sounds to me like you have fallen victim to the propaganda played out by the mainstream media about how each country "feels" about this or that candidate instead of understanding that there are varying factions of ideology in every country, each vying for control.

Please read what I actually wrote; I acknowledged this fact, and have not ruled Israeli hackers out entirely.

And again, this is only considering state-sponsored hacking...and not hacktivists, whistleblowers, or anyone else who could have ALSO gotten access (and did) to those servers.

Once again, the material released and way it was released argues in favor of a specific strategy, one Russia has been known to employ: flood the internet with too much "information," then impose a narrative onto it. (Cf: MH-17. "We may never know the truth.")

No one is denying that Russia or a dozen or more other state-sponsored hackers have access government related servers, let alone private parties like the DNC or RNC. But that doesn't make them the source to Wikileaks.

Nor does it prove that they are not. The MO matches Russia's; Russia seems to be the primary beneficiary. Motive, opportunity, benefit. What part are you not understanding?

Furthermore, releasing the TRUTH about who and what those people were really doing is not "hacking an election."

Where do I ever make that claim? Nowhere. Why must you create a strawman like that? If you are defending the TRUTH, why must YOU LIE?

Giving people information to make an informed opinion had nothing to do with altering, erasing, or adding ballots at the state level.

Once again, I never made that claim. This is a counterfactual narrative being circulated by Russian trolls to obscure the real issue: theft.

Actually the phishing attack described is very very basic. Millions of people all over the world can do it.

a reply to: UKTruth

It's not the sophistication of the attack; it is the sophistication of the use of the hacked material. Why no real smoking gun? Why so much irrelevant material? Why did it get so much traction on line when it said so very little of importance? Yes, the first wave was designed to disillusion kids who had unrealistic expectations about Bernie, but why not stop there?

a reply to: UKTruth

Not only that, but the fact that John Podesta admitted himself in the emails that he lost his phone in a cab, take it down the block and get it cracked for 50 bucks is no giant feat either. The Mental Gymnastics of the left continue to astound and bewilder critical thinkers like ourselves.

a reply to: TrueAmerican

If you read the report and understand computers at all, it stands out as an amazing bunch of crap disguised as technical jargon meant to fool people who think the cd tray is a drink holder.

This "highly sophisticated cyber attack" report is nothing more than essentially a cut and paste off of a anti-virus definition and the rest of it describes pretty much the most simplistic level of trojans and redirects. This sort of stuff is easily stopped by the most simplistic email filters and firewalls. Worse yet, the actual attack as described requires high level people within the dnc, as in the ones who had their emails hacked, to click through multiple security warnings to allow a macro to run after it opens the file in protected mode - which you will have to leave in order for it to start editing - which also gets an on screen warning. If this is how stupid the dnc is they deserve to get hacked. And lets not forget, this is all happening under hillary, who is under investigation by the FBI for gross incompetence in her handling of sensitive data previously has senior staff members who read mail from their junk folder from questionable sources and repeatedly answer yes to prompts essentially asking them if they're an idiot. And they cant click 'yes' fast enough.

And if Russia did use these xp era low tech attacks leaving such an obvious trail, they deserve to get caught. But we all know they didn't. Don't believe the b s.

originally posted by: Vroomfondel
a reply to: TrueAmerican

If you read the report and understand computers at all, it stands out as an amazing bunch of crap disguised as technical jargon meant to fool people who think the cd tray is a drink holder.

This "highly sophisticated cyber attack" report is nothing more than essentially a cut and paste off of a anti-virus definition and the rest of it describes pretty much the most simplistic level of trojans and redirects. This sort of stuff is easily stopped by the most simplistic email filters and firewalls. Worse yet, the actual attack as described requires high level people within the dnc, as in the ones who had their emails hacked, to click through multiple security warnings to allow a macro to run after it opens the file in protected mode - which you will have to leave in order for it to start editing - which also gets an on screen warning. If this is how stupid the dnc is they deserve to get hacked. And lets not forget, this is all happening under hillary, who is under investigation by the FBI for gross incompetence in her handling of sensitive data previously has senior staff members who read mail from their junk folder from questionable sources and repeatedly answer yes to prompts essentially asking them if they're an idiot. And they cant click 'yes' fast enough.

And if Russia did use these xp era low tech attacks leaving such an obvious trail, they deserve to get caught. But we all know they didn't. Don't believe the b s.

Exactly. Any person with even a rudimentary understanding of IT can see how ridiculous the document is. It is not designed for those people, it is designed for those that have no clue and and have already drawn a conclusion with no evidence. I saw the effect on Fox News, with one political commentator now saying its proven because of the document just released - i.e. just the issuance of a document no matter what it contained was enough to confirm their pre held position.

a reply to: DJW001

The targets were compromised through a phishing attack. If you were anyone half-versed in computer networking, you'd know that the only thing you need to accomplish a phishing attack is Kali Linux. And then there's hacking as a service where a non-computer literate person could actually PAY a hacker to do this service for them. There are numerous ways to complete the type of basic attacks which were done without it coming from a state-sponsored organization.

Anyone with rudimentary knowledge in the IT industry knows that the JAR report is essentially much ado about nothing. It explains nothing and can prove nothing. And as for your comment about why should the NSA provide proof? Because that is their job! Because if they had definitive proof of a foreign country acting aggressively to undermine our national security or system of government, it is their responsibility to inform the public and show that proof. Doing so would NOT leak sensitive or classified information unless the NSA or any other intelligence agency retrieved that information illegally.

White House fails to make case that Russian hackers tampered with election

Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups.

...

Security consultant Jeffrey Carr also cast doubt on claims that attacks that hit the Democratic National Committee could only have originated from Russian-sponsored hackers because they relied on the same malware that also breached Germany's Bundestag and French TV network TV5Monde. Proponents of this theory, including the CrowdStrike researchers who analyzed the Democratic National Committee's hacked network, argue that the pattern strongly implicates Russia because no other actor would have the combined motivation and resources to hack the same targets. But as Carr pointed out, the full source code for the X-Agent implant that has long been associated with APT28 was independently obtained by researchers from antivirus provider Eset.

"If ESET could do it, so can others," Carr wrote. "It is both foolish and baseless to claim, as CrowdStrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the Russian government when the source code is there for anyone to find and use at will."

originally posted by: Chadwickus
a reply to: Namdru

Can you explain WHY to us laypeople then?

I'm really not the best person to attempt that. The simple fact of the matter is, that with enough manpower, the entire news apparatus of the world wide web can be spoofed, or faked. It's only a matter of manpower. Everything else -- originating IP's, routing traces, individual pings -- all can be spoofed, faked, or whatever, via man-in-the-middle or man-anywhere-else exploits on internet-connected machines. Theoretically any form of deception, data creation, or data deletion, is possible -- locally or remotely. If you can imagine it happening, it can be made to happen -- or appear to happen -- on a computer.

That is a very, very deep statement if you thing about it carefully. This is why information from books always has been, and always will be, more precious than anything from a computer screen.

Do think about it.

a reply to: Namdru


OK but can you fake an IP address numbers? That is the question. or must someone seize the computer? I honestly do not know. There may be many innocent people who have been charged as hackers who therefore need to be freed.

originally posted by: Tiger5
a reply to: Namdru


OK but can you fake an IP address numbers? That is the question.

All of that can be faked if you own a machine(s) routing data on the internet's backbone. The NSA already owns ATT, and ATT routes most of our nation's communications one way or another.

So yes, you can fake IP addresses and everything else. Like I said, if you can imagine it, it is possible. Including framing the wrong people...though they tend to get the right people, since they (i.e., the FBI et. al.) already have a lot of the right people working for them.