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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 31 2016, @07:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-knew-what-when dept.

To date, the only public evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacks of the DNC and key Democratic figures has been circumstantial and far short of conclusive, courtesy of private research firms with a financial stake in such claims. Multiple federal agencies now claim certainty about the Kremlin connection, but they have yet to make public the basis for their beliefs.

Now, a never-before-published top-secret document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden suggests the NSA has a way of collecting evidence of Russian hacks, because the agency tracked a similar hack before in the case of a prominent Russian journalist, who was also a U.S. citizen.

[...] NSA whistleblowers have so far given the best idea of what the NSA's signals intelligence on Russia, today or in 2005, could look like. Earlier this year, Snowden tweeted that if the Russian government was indeed behind the hacking of the Democrats, the NSA most likely has the goods, noting that XKEYSCORE, a sort of global SIGINT search engine, "makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops." Snowden went so far as to say that nailing down this sort of SIGINT hacker attribution "is the only case in which mass surveillance has actually proven effective."

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/top-secret-snowden-document-reveals-what-the-nsa-knew-about-previous-russian-hacking/


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @02:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @02:42AM (#448020)

    > Well, unless there's solid evidence that it was Russia or any other specific country or entity, I lack a belief that it was.

    Fortunately the definition of "solid evidence" is so completely fluid that it can be adjusted to dismiss any actual evidence. Kinda like the way all those geeks rationalized Hans Reiser's innocence.
    Even when a senior russian insider admits to russia's complicity, [ibtimes.co.uk] that's still not solid enough, amirite? ofcourseiam!

    > the content that was leaked is more important.

    Yeah releasing oppo-research and campaign strategies was pretty damn important.

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