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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Justin Case on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:06PM (4 children)
Our stuff was not secure, so it must be somebody else's fault.
Will the masses ever understand that a hack is not just a magic event, but that it is usually enabled by mistakes and carelessness on the part of the target?
Also, if you're holding masses of confidential information, military secrets, or let's say information so critical that it could alter an election outcome... spend more than 10 bucks to protect it maybe?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:26PM (1 child)
Sure, you wanna keep those CC numbers safe, just send them to me with $10 and I'll keep 'em safe for you.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by chromas on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:16PM
For ten dolla? No thanks. I don't trust you for ten dollars. Here, take $30,000.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:12AM
This is the party who's Jesus had a mail server in her closet and laughed off security concerns about her blackberry. Everyone was supposed to just bend over and bow, not hack or copy.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:47AM
> Will the masses ever understand that a hack is not just a magic event, but that it is usually enabled by mistakes and carelessness on the part of the target?
This simply is not true. In every movie I've seen, the hackers are successful because they have Eastern European accents.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NewNic on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:07PM (11 children)
People have residential Gigabit Internet speeds now and had them in 2016. It's also possible that the data was staged to a server in a datacenter with even greater speeds.
Also, based on the figures on this page, USB 2.0 speeds are potentially much greater than 22.7MB/s:
https://superuser.com/questions/317217/whats-the-maximum-typical-speed-possible-with-a-usb2-0-drive [superuser.com]
This analysis should not get any attention because it is worthless and can be refuted with very little effort.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:36PM (1 child)
Depends on the drive. Theoretical is like 50MB but I have a 32g drive that does 14 max. A decent quality drive should be in the 20-30 range. Its more the speed of the flash memory.
Its not conclusive proof by any means but its much easier to achieve with a drive than network trickery, especially going back to russia where the ping and overhead are huge. It would be easy for the DNC to say this was our symmetric gig package for the server so try again or to hand the servers to someone other than crowd strike. As it stands they were shady about the whole thing. In the leaked emails they were shady too. Their un-trustworthiness is all I can take away from the whole situation.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:21PM
Ping times to russia are 150-300ms and aren't indicative of throughput... but it's totally irrelevant because an APT is not going to log into TOR from russia. They're probably going to try and keep their intrusion staging separated from whatever tunneling they hide behind. See they know that the USA has some unquantified traffic analysis capability so they don't want a persistent data stream between them and their target.
Anyhow we can jerk off about what's happening but making some sort of claim about hard disk transfer rates and american ISP speeds is complete bullshit.
https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=+"It+is+not+our+business+to+determine+his+merits%2C+that+is+up+to+US+voters%2C"&oq=+"It+is+not+our+business+to+determine+his+merits%2C+that+is+up+to+US+voters%2C" [google.com]
Putin is most certainly running a program to interfere with elections... here he is making a sarcastic comment well before there was any discussion of russian interference.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:40PM (1 child)
The "analysis" that it was a Russian hack was unsupported and easily refuted but that didn't stop any of the corporate media and Hillary shills from repeating that meme.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:33PM
The first part I'd buy. It's going to be difficult to get concrete evidence.
But how do you refute being hacked by an advanced persistent threat? It's practically impossible.
So I know you're a liar.
(Score: 1) by jpmahala on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:47PM (3 children)
Um, did you even read the article which you linked to? According to comments, it seems that transfer speeds for most USB 2.0 devices fall typically between 18-32MB/s.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:51PM (2 children)
Incorrect, most devices fall between 10-20, you must be thinking of 3.0. I have yet to see a 2.0 usb drive do better than 15 myself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:45PM (1 child)
Try not running Ubuntu on a TRS-80.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:40AM
I've been doing that my entire life!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:29PM (2 children)
You realize there's a difference between actual and theoretical throughput right? The narrative has them 'hacking' through multiple nodes to cover their tracks with the actual destination being somewhere in eastern Europe. There are a whole bunch of factors here that would significantly decrease actual throughput and make the claimed speed (that's in excess of 180 megabits per second) inconsistent with that scenario. On the other hand it's about exactly what is commonly seen when using a keydrive.
"It's also possible that the data was staged to a server in a datacenter with even greater speeds."
But it's not possible that this was done without it being observed by our vigilant watchers. If it was done that way they'd know exactly how it was done, they would have evidence instead of weasel words in their 'assessments.'
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NewNic on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:10PM
The point of my comment is not to prove that it was a Russian hack, but to show that the "evidence" that it wasn't a Russian hack is just, if not more, lacking.
These "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" are massively overstating their case.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:14AM
Dunno what's going on, has someone done something to TCP algorithms since the 90s, have ISPs cut back insane overselling of their bandwidth, or whether CDNs are actually within millisecond distances from all mid-sized cities but to my experience downloading tens of megabytes per second isn't anymore a holy shit moment if you happen to have a gigabit link.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:53PM (2 children)
I thank and I honor Seth Rich. He was a great and a very brave cyber warrior who died to further my agenda. Cyber is like being in Vietnam. You’re the equivalent of a soldier going over to Vietnam. And Seth hacked the cyber of the DNC, hacked the EMAILS system so that I could become President. And make America great again. 🇺🇸
(Score: 3, Funny) by Sulla on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:35PM (1 child)
I was wondering how long it would take before the DNC decided rather than say Seth Rich was a honorable good worker they would be unable to maintain their Russia narrative without throwing him under the bus. Looks like the time has finally come to admit that Seth Rich was secretly all along a Russian agent working for Putin and Trump to undermine the elections by leaking information showing how corrupt the DNC is. It is really unfair how the DNC is being treated just because their emails got released showing how corrupt they are, they should be allowed to hide these facts and continue doing business as normal.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:54PM
Just to be clear, Seth wasn't working for me. No matter what the Dems say. He was working for my agenda of American greatness. America's agenda. He leaked those EMAILS because it was the right thing to do. Wow, Seth was a terrific leaker! Heroic. I like leakers when they help me win. 🇺🇸
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @07:45PM (6 children)
All the contards getting worked up about this forget their own proud legacy.
Benghazi benghazi benghazi! Emails emails emails!
Yeah, only the Democrats engage in narratives. Now, aside from pointing out your hypocrisy, there is proof the DNC got hacked and non-partisan intelligence agencies say the evidence points to Russia. There is piles of evidence linking Trump's administration to Russia.
How it will all fall out is unclear, how culpable Trump is also unclear, but you ignorant stooges are soldiers in the propaganda war trying to cast doubt on to anything that harms your tribe. Pathetic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:48PM (2 children)
Turnabout is fair play, mate.
(Score: 2) by e_armadillo on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:16PM
Treating this as a zero sum game is plain stupid. In the end, we all really lose. I wishboth sides would pull their heads out of their asses . . .
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:35PM
As the red states exploit themselves into poverty and those with a clue move into the blue zones... eventually you'll be poor enough to clean our shitters and support our sex tourism. Then it'll be time to build the wall.
Maybe we'll even put a statue of lee on top to be nice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:32AM
No, there isn't. Just people saying stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:31AM
You wouldn't happen to want to purchase a bridge, would you?
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Sulla on Wednesday August 16 2017, @03:53AM
If we go ahead and assume that Trump does have ties with Russia, how many Americans died due to his connection? Zero?
I don't think we can say the same about Benghazi.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 4, Interesting) by drussell on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:20PM (1 child)
Wikileaks has steadfastly maintained all along that the information published there did NOT come from "Russians"...
I thought it was settled long ago that it was someone from inside the DNC that released that particular copy of the stuff. It is quite likely that there were multiple copies of similar, potentially overlapping information obtained from various multiple sources, some potentially "hacks" into systems, others very likely intentionally from insiders.
This part of the "Russia Scandal" has no legs and I have no idea why people keep blustering on about it.
Now, as to Trump's deep and longstanding ties with some "not-so-friendly" people in Russia over the years, that is a completely different and interesting saga!
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 15 2017, @09:36PM
Yeah, Wikileaks has maintained that the data did not come from the Russians. And I'm sure that the source would have properly identified himself....not.
This doesn't mean that it did come from Russia...it means you can't know WHO an electronic communication comes from. If it's worth checking carefully, it's probably worth spoofing carefully...and spoofing is easier than checking.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:44PM
23MB/sec = USB 2.0 flash storage. Of course, time stamps can be altered... It still isn't conclusive one way or the other.
The real news here is that this (or anything from VIPS) actually made it into the corporate media.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday August 15 2017, @08:53PM
Modified for future perspective.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:49PM (1 child)
What is with the bold block font for the headlines? Never before have I seen such on SoylentNews, at least not in the body. Do the eds think we will not pay enough attention? Or are we trying to be alt-right media, now?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:26AM
Indeed Bold is synonymous with heading the Alt-right.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by srobert on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:00AM
My analogy is that a peeping Tom looks into a window and sees a child being abused. He reports it to the police, thus exposing his own misbehavior. The child abuser gets the neighborhood all up in arms about the peeping Tom that's been "invading our privacy". Somehow everyone forgets about the child abuse and breaks out the torches and pitchforks to go after the peeping Tom.
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:33AM
There are only two ways to look at this.
View one: The intel agencies really are as advertised in the propaganda. They have limitless resources, they are super competent and they all even have big stainless steel dicks. Of course their experts carefully reworked all metadata and timestamps and thus none of it is worth a damn, they rewrote all of the log files too and none of that is useful, in short they are all just so damned clever and competent that we won't ever know who did what. They even cleverly rewrote the text to insert things while flawlessly editing those thousands of documents so no inconsistencies can be discovered. Damn, but they are so omnicompetent!
View two: The WikiLeaks Vault 7 leaks show that intelligence agencies are barely as good as the hacker kidz doing it for money or lulz, often even poaching their code for reuse. They aren't all knowing, they make mistakes and this makes them trackable.
Will we ever know for sure who did what in any affair involving intelligence agencies? Oh Hell no. But since there still ain't any credible evidence the Russians did it after going on a year of trying really hard it is time to let it go guys. If view one holds you can't nail em so stop chasing that whale, and in view two we know they probably didn't do it, today's story is just one more confirmation. So either they didn't do it or you can't prove it, either way you jus 'bating.
The simple theories are usually best anyway. Seth Rich had motive and opportunity and somebody went to the bother of commiting Arkancide on his ass for some reason. Until that murder gets solved we probably should take a wait and see attitude. Yea I know, but Trump! Get over it, you lost.
(Score: 1) by Ingar on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:18PM
Last year I upgraded my internet connection to my ISP's 200Mbit plan.
Download speed maxes out at around 23MB/sec.
I'm also a lot poorer now.
(Score: 1) by axsdenied on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:52PM (2 children)
It is easy to achieve those rates by transferring data to, for example, a hacked AWS account. Why would anyone assume that whoever did the hack tried to copy data directly (or via VPN) to Russia (or wherever)?
If they had the brains to do the hack they most likely had the brains to find a fast way to get the data out. Otherwise they would risk detection and interruption of the data transfer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @03:30PM (1 child)
"It is easy to achieve those rates by transferring data to, for example, a hacked AWS account."
Why don't you youtube a demo of that pal.
180Mbs is a lot of capacity. That is more than a four bonded DS3s worth of backhaul. If you count overhead and transmission efficiency, maybe even five. You think these guys had an OC-48 connected up to their mail server? Bullshit.
Though it should be simple enough to confirm. Their backhaul capacity should be available via FOIA. They were after all, paying the bill for that pipe. So the respective information does exist. Though I'm sure it will disappear, and the poor billing clerk will have have died in a car accident or something.
(Score: 1) by axsdenied on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:21AM
Interesting that you are arguing for something that not even the OP bothered commenting on, their backhaul speeds. I am sure with all the money available DNC are not on dialup :-)
And you completely lost your credibility when talking about conspiracies, murders etc.
I should remember not to feed the trolls!!!