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We had two submissions on reports that maybe the Russians were not behind the hack of the DNC (Democratic National Committee):
Evidence that Undermines the "Election Hack" Narrative Should get More Attention
Bloomberg reports:
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been investigating the now conventional wisdom that last year's leaks of Democratic National Committee files were the result of Russian hacks. What they found instead is evidence to the contrary.
[...] The VIPS theory relies on forensic findings by independent researchers who go by the pseudonyms "Forensicator" and "Adam Carter." The former found that 1,976 MB of Guccifer's files were copied from a DNC server on July 5 in just 87 seconds, implying a transfer rate of 22.6 megabytes per second -- or, converted to a measure most people use, about 180 megabits per second, a speed not commonly available from U.S. internet providers. Downloading such files this quickly over the internet, especially over a VPN (most hackers would use one), would have been all but impossible because the network infrastructure through which the traffic would have to pass would further slow the traffic. However, as Forensicator has pointed out, the files could have been copied to a thumb drive -- something only an insider could have done -- at about that speed.
Adam Carter, the pseudonym for the other analyst, showed that the content of the Guccifer files was at some point cut and pasted into Microsoft Word templates that used the Russian language. Carter laid out all the available evidence and his answers to numerous critics in a long post earlier this month.
A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year's DNC Hack
The Nation reports:
Former NSA experts say it wasn't a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC's system.
[...] On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC's server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second. These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed.
[...] "A speed of 22.7 megabytes [per second] is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer," Folden said. "Based on the data we now have, what we've been calling a hack is impossible." Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. "Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance," he wrote. "Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive)."
[...] "It's clear," another forensics investigator wrote, "that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings."
[...] By any balanced reckoning, the official case purporting to assign a systematic hacking effort to Russia, the events of mid-June and July 5 last year being the foundation of this case, is shabby to the point taxpayers should ask for their money back.
[...] Editor's note: After publication, the Democratic National Committee contacted The Nation with a response, writing, "U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. It's unfortunate that The Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tonyPick on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:48PM (31 children)
I saw this in the submissions queue and took a look earlier, and really this doesn't deserve much attention. We should be skeptical about stories on the DNC hack, and the sources for Wikileaks information, but we should be equally skeptical about people claiming to prove *or* disprove it, and even more skeptical if we *want* to believe them.
So, the main highlight here is that the file timestamps in the Guccifer leak archive are close together, and this shows that files were copied and... no really, that's about it.
Would the timestamps look like this if it was an internal copy downloaded to a USB stick? Sure. Would they also look like that if they were obtained from a hack? Yes, because they'd be relayed through other machines (AWS instances, rsynced, locally recopied, etc). The idea that hackers would just send files directly to their home PC and mail you a copy of that is crazy.(As a side note Over at HN [ycombinator.com] they highlight that this is exactly what you'd get from using a hacked AWS micro instance as a relay VPS).
So on the one hand we have this, which doesn't prove much of anything.
And for this whole fake-attack theory to be true then the Democrats have to have fabricated an attack against their own network, and Crowdstrike have to be in on it to manufacture the evidence. And it has to be good enough to fool (at least) Fidelis, SecureWorks, Mandiant and ThreatConnect. And convince several US intelligence agencies to go along with it. And also this fabricated hacking campaign is realistic enough to persuade several overseas intelligence agencies it's happening. And been running "well enough to fool the FBI" since 2015 (and how they're doing that *before* the leak is apparently left as an exercise for the reader).
And at no point does it occur to them to poison the fabricated version of the hacked data to discredit the original leak. And all this to prove the Russians did it rather than an internal leak, for.... well, for no particularly good reason that anyone can describe without going into Clinton-as-ninja-assassin territory.
Oh, and the cover story is also chosen to be something that the Trump campaign is actually trying to do. Only despite the DNC knowing enough about that to set this whole thing up in advance, execute it perfectly, and get the timing right to set up the Trump campaign, they then decide to keep quiet about this specific information until several months _after_ the election, again for no particular reason?
At this point you might as well tack on "Organized from the Martian Slave Mines, with plans just behind the set of the faked Moon landing, on the shelf between Obama's real birth certificate and the chemical formula for the drugs they put in aircraft trails to turn people into gay liberals." Because even jmorris isn't crazy-dumb enough to fall for the timestamps thing, so why not follow the tried and true alt-right method of just throwing in any old shit and see what sticks?
(Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday August 15 2017, @05:54PM (18 children)
> from the who-you-gonna-believe? dept.
True, who are you going to believe? The NSA, the head of the FBI who helped ruin Clinton's campaign, testifying under oath that the Russians interfered in Trump's favor, or something someone told someone on the Internet about someone doing something shady?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:53PM (17 children)
Since we already know the NSA, etc. lie to congress and the public, who should we believe?
And of course the DNC doesn't like it when someone rains on their narrative. After reading some of the emails, I sure as hell am not going to believe them. They are engaging in pure distraction with this Russian thing.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by i286NiNJA on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:25PM (7 children)
Yeah exactly who should you believe?
You can find your own non-government indications of russian interference if you care so much. But you don't actually care so you should stop having opinions because you're confusing our nation's many idiots with your bullshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:33PM (5 children)
Where is this concrete evidence of Russian interference?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:08PM (3 children)
There's no real evidence either way, and why would you expect there to be such evidence? Copying files isn't a one-time action, it can happen multiple times, and you'll only get the time stamp from the clock on the system with the final time. (So you can't even trust the data for the decade in which it first happened, much less the millisecond.)
This post is clearly PR. So was the one blaming the Russians. There's a bit of evidence (not proof) that someone using a Russian IP address was involved. Whoopie. It's not as if everyone using a Russian IP address works for the government, nor even as if it's particularly hard to fake an IP address.
FWIW, I do tend to feel that some Russian hackers were involved. No proof, just a feeling. I've not even a feeling to cause me to think they worked for the government. There are supposed to be lots of hackers in Russia available for hire.
P.S.: Notice how the word crackers never really caught on. Not even on this site.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:09AM (2 children)
I don't see any evidence of vote or vote count tampering by the Russians.
If the voters were influenced by the Russians helping to get that info published so what? Fox News, CNN, etc were also trying to do the same.
It's as silly as saying CNN hacked the election thus making it invalid just because one of their sources hacked a party's server and CNN published stories based on the info. Even more so if the info was published without significant alteration to its meaning and context.
tldr; at most so far I see just illegal "journalism". For real election hacking please look at the gerrymandering by the various guilty parties and voter intimidation etc.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:25PM (1 child)
Even so just because some russian hackers hacked the DNC doesn't mean the _election_ itself was hacked which is the narrative many are trying to push - especially "The election was hacked by the Russians (so we should discard the result which we don't like)".
That's a strawman argument. Nobody is saying we should ignore the election results.
We're saying that if Donald Trump colluded with the Russians and knowingly benefited from a criminal hacking operation, he should be tried in a court of law per the constitution.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Wednesday August 16 2017, @11:17PM
Yes and if you stole a car and robbed a liquor store you should go to jail. But I have no evidence of that.
Nearly a year in, is there any evidence of this alleged collusion? Or just a hundred thousand news stories repeating the same speculation?
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:30PM
I never said there was anything concrete but you can clearly observe the collaboration of FSB and right wing media you can see putin himself making sarcastic remarks about our election well before russian interference was a news topic way back when trump was still a joke.
Hacking the DNC is exactly the sort of stuff that is observed by exit node operators... the dnc ran a bad shop it's almost a foregone conclusion that russia and china were going to hack them I don't even understand how the topic could be up for debate.
Let's say that right now bernie sanders was president.... and it came to light that the DNC IT infrastructure was laughably bad (Par for the course when politicians are in charge of IT).... I would have been surprised if you told me that neither china or russia had hacked them.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:19PM
Your strong opinion is noted. However, not all bias comes from the government.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:23AM
The definition of the character required to be a spy is: someone who is duplicitous, underhanded, secretive, and above all, the ability to lie, subvert, misdirect and conceal whilst maintaining anonymity, and if caught, a straight face.
Putting your trust in these kinds of people is foolish at best.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:05AM (2 children)
The DNC, after annointing HRC in a biased primary, needed to shift the blame for losing to Trump (*). Unfortunately, they want to shift the blame so much they're willing to start global thermonuclear armageddon over the fact that their hand-picked warmongering wall street shill lost. Throw in the fact that the FBI and NSA are about the least trustworthy organizations in all the free world, and you know what? Fuck DNC. I don't care if they got hacked by Russia or not. It isn't who did the leaking or hacking, it's the fucking CONTENT.
(*) The fact that Democrats could lose to Trump and still keep that whole retarded cabal in power at the DNC, shows how lost the party is. A dog turd could have beat Trump, but no, they just had to have Hillary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:24AM (1 child)
DWS was fired and they had a whole big process of replacing her that was widely covered in the news? New minority leader in the senate, etc?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:49PM
... and prompted to a Nationwide position in Hillary's campaign, which she probably already had truth be told.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:22AM (4 children)
The DNC is using a republican investigator nominated by a republican DOJ official to distract? That's some real 5d chess they pulled off
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:24AM (2 children)
Yeah, and the voters are playing checkers... King me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:47PM (1 child)
That's what Trump said...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:42PM
That's what Trump said...
Heh... That would be so cool if he really did!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:50PM
I think we're up to 13D chess
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:15PM (7 children)
Many things you said are dubious, but this particularly stands out.
One thing you certainly understand is that in the US politics is one giant game of quid quo pro. Politicians work their way up through cronyism, backdoor deals, and something for something. This game doesn't end when one politician does. For instance one of Obama's final acts was to attempt to force through the controversial TPP treaty which was essentially going to be the king of corporate handouts. Even though he was leaving office, his cronyism didn't end. Of course not. He's now getting paid $400,000 to give a speech on Wall Street. Nobody thinks he has anything to say that's worth $400k as they asked valuable questions like what he missed about the White House and he reminisced over aesthetics. It's just cleanly laundered payments for services rendered.
This system is enormously beneficial to both the politicians in office, with more than half of congress now being millionaires, and for the corporations that toss relative table scraps to have national level laws hand crafted for them, if not by them. Trump is an enormous threat to this system. He acted like a jack ass, said all the wrong things, ran a poorly funded campaign, suffered 24/7 attacks from all the corporate media including towards the end even Fox News. And he won. He's not going to be bending over backwards for campaign donations. He doesn't care about the Sanator from Alabama's pork project. He's not aiming to get paid off with $400k speeches after office.
In the eyes of both the politicians and corporations that benefit from the status quo, Trump needs to be destroyed. And they can't wait for a controversy. Somehow he was, inexplicably, resonating with people. You need a controversy - now. That controversy is Russia. It has numerous benefits, but two stand out. The first is that Trump has extensive business interests and connections. He's connected to just about everybody in Russia by a few degrees of separation. They'll be able to constantly dig up 'something' and all that matters is keeping the headlines rolling, people never see the goal posts constantly shifting. The other is something even more overt. It's clear that Trump's 'machismo' is one of the things that clearly resonated with people. Putin is somebody that can be easily portrayed into dominating Trump - turning Trump into his bitch. Read this [bbc.com] BBC article keeping this in mind. Compare the infographics, the image selections, selected quotes, absolutely everything. That is straight up propaganda and it's only possible thanks to our Russian conspiracies that have built up this relationship.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:02AM (4 children)
Nobody thinks most celebrities have anything particularly valuable to say; its about 'prestige' and 'relevance'. The value is in the 'rarity of the goods' relative to the demand. Obama is in high demand for speaking engagements as a relatively popular former US president. There aren't a lot of those around, and only exactly one who is the 'most recent'. So yeah, Obama is a bigger get than G.W. Bush, or Jimmy Carter; and he costs more. This isn't clever money laundering, this is just basic economics and what the market will bear.
Penn and Teller cost more to perform at your party than your average magician too; Beyonce costs more than another band -- they aren't 10's of 1000s of times better, even though they are 10s of 1000s of times more expensive than a lot of perfectly good alternatives.
He's far to busy selling double priced memberships at Maralago right now.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @03:50AM (3 children)
Who do you think is paying Obama to speak? Some entertainment business? These are not institutions that have celebrities speak. Obama's first payday was with Cantor Fitzgerald. An organization I'm certain neither of us had heard of yet.
It took about 3 seconds to verify [housingwire.com] the hypothesis. Cantor Fitzgerald massively profited off not only the mortgage crisis but even engaged in securities fraud defrauding the government. And the only repercussion they seem to have suffered was some low level trader getting to play fallguy, while Obama now gets paid $400k from them to tell them how pretty the view at the Whitehouse was. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Feel free to research each and every place he gives a speech. With $400k fees there's going to be connections right back to quid quo pro. And since I expect you think this is political. It's not, well it's at least not partisan. Like you mention this goes well back. The first president to really start raking in the overt "fees" was Ford, the unelected president who served three years after replacing and then of course also immediately pardoning Nixon. A beacon of integrity that perhaps set the stage for today's politics or at least politicians.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday August 17 2017, @12:58AM (2 children)
To discover what? That people likely to book a speaker have some reason to like the speaker? Oh boy, you are really on to something there. The contractors that Trump stiffed on payments didn't invite Trump to the company picnic to speak? Shocking! The company that landed the contract to make Ivanka brand shoes did invite him to speak? Equally shocking. It can't just be normal human relationships and normal business operation -- It must be corruption!! I'm still not convinced there is anything remotely salacious about it.
Everyone who has ever been asked to give a keynote has some 'positive connection' to the organization that asked them. What else would you expect? Or turn it upside down -- if that positive connection didn't exist, why would the organization want them as a keynote speaker? You can't simply jump to the conclusion that its some sort of quasi money laundering scheme to payback for illegal favors or something. That's crazy talk.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday August 18 2017, @12:24PM (1 child)
It can be both. That's why these kinds of relationships are explicitly banned (at least for the underlings) by most corporate and government employment rules. If I buy a product from IBM, have a good talk with the sales guy, and he takes me out to dinner, I'd lose my job. Doesn't matter if we're just hanging out, doesn't matter if we aren't discussing work, doesn't matter if it doesn't affect my decision in any way, it still looks like it could be a bribe so I'd lose my job. So a dinner is a potential bribe, but a check for $400k is just "normal business operation"...this is why our country is fucked.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday August 18 2017, @11:50PM
The issue here is that this would be like you buying a product from IBM and developing a rapport with the sales rep. Then 2 years late you know that rep is looking to make a move and you've been impressed with him, so you decide to hire him. Now that's a potential bribe too right, he OBVIOUSLY has been screwing over IBM on your behalf for years, and NOW your paying him back with a nice job. This was a all a long con, right?
Neither he, nor you can ever be hired the other in the future! In fact, it applies to anyone you have a professional relationship with... your entire personal network... you can't use it for anything ever because any move you make is possibly a bribe. If it gets you a job or you use it to find a good employee or service provider or even a client... its all dirty quid pro quo.
The world doesn't work like that. Corruption is real, but we can't just assume it... there has to be real evidence, of X for Y. The simple hindsight that you bought a product from Jason the salesreap at IBM and then years later hired Jason for a regional sales position at your company is not sufficient.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:09AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tonyPick on Wednesday August 16 2017, @08:29AM
Which is why you travel back in time to 2015 to start manufacturing an detailed evidence trail for a complex conspiracy most of which you don't disclose pre-election? Of something his campaign just happens to be trying to set up anyway? Despite a string of open confessions of "dubious" behaviour (and remembering that the historic bar for actually impeaching presidents was "not telling the absolute truth"?)
Seriously? Because if you wanted to make something up then it isn't like you'd be short of targets that get directly to Trump personally, making the hacking story a particularly idiotic choice since the only direct connections to him so far have been a direct result of his own post-election screwups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:07PM (3 children)
Not the file timestamp metadata attached to the 'outside' of the file.
Why is this important? It means those changes were made when the document was created/modified, NOT when it was transferred/copies, except in the case that it was copied and pasted on someone's computer utilizing MS Office 2010 either before or after being transferred.
Furthermore none of the transfer methods you mentioned should result in internal metadata changes, although depending on configuration options some of them may change the external timestamps if not told to archive the files with timestamps held intact (to whatever degree the underlying filesystems will accept external timestamp values when saving 'new' files onto them.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:12PM
Computers! So complicated! It is like anyone could say anything about he DNC hack by Russians, and make it plausible. Except to those who understand how file systems work. Story is bullshit!
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:32PM (1 child)
If your point is true, then it would be significant. But the stories (well, the summaries) have seemed to mean the file's timestamp. In that case there should probably be more significant metadata present than just the time stamp. Things like O, I don't know, not being an MS Office user, but perhaps the id of the user?
OTOH, in that case you are just saying when it was written out, not when it was copied. Unless you have some evidence that those happened simultaneously. Still, that does make being at the exact speed of a write to USB drive more significant...but why would someone being sneaky do that? In that case the leak would probably be the person in charge of editing the files. Seems quite unlikely, even so. Copying being done separately is much more reasonable even if the copying were done by the person in charge of editing the files. Less chance of being observed.
I consider your point possible, but unlikely without evidence from other sources, and currently such evidence as I've bothered to look at is vaguely contradictory. Still, I'll keep it in mind.
P.S.: The time that the system attaches to the file when it's doing a copy *IS* metadata. Data that the program that creates the file contains is less properly called metadata than that, though from the perspective of someone reading the file both are metadata. Your point that it's "metadata in the files" would be significant only if I knew that the author of the sentence was extremely picky about grammar AND was a technical expert. Neither alone would suffice. Even then, I wouldn't be sure. People tend to use that term quite sloppily, and most don't distinguish between data supplied by the OS and data written by some other program. Still, if your assertions are correct then it does indicate that the data was written by MSOffice to a USB stick directly. But that is more data than I expect a program to write. Time of start, sure, but time of completion? Last I used MSWindows the file didn't really exist until after it had been closed, so time of completion doesn't seem to make sense...and if it exists it pretty much needs to be a fabrication. Still, even if it's a fabrication there would probably be a systematic relationship between the given time of completion and the actual time of completion, but it would almost certainly depend on the current computer work load.
OTOH, I'm sure no expert on MSOffice. Maybe everything you say is correct. But I'm not sure I'd trust the information provided by ANYONE associated with this case.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:54AM
> If your point is true, then it would be significant. But the stories (well, the summaries) have seemed to mean the file's timestamp.
According to a deep link [wordpress.com] (linked from the Bloomberg article), this is about timestamps within a 7zip archive.