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from the did-they-get-the-size-on-Hillary's-pant-suits? dept.
Two separate groups of Russian hackers have reportedly had their way with the Democratic National Committee's network for months... up until last weekend:
Russian hackers have been accessing the Democratic National Committee's computer network for the past year, and have stolen information including opposition research files on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
According to CrowdStrike, the security firm the DNC called in to deal with the massive data breach, one group of hackers tied to the Russian government has been stealing information from the national party for about a year. "They infiltrated the DNC's network last summer and were monitoring their communications, their email servers, and the like," company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch told NPR.
A second group, also tied to Russia, accessed the DNC's network in April. "They went straight for the research department of the DNC and exfiltrated opposition materials on Mr. Trump," Alperovitch said.
The Washington Post first reported the DNC break-in.
CrowdStrike doesn't believe the two distinct groups of Russian hackers — which the company has internally nicknamed COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR — collaborated with each other. "Instead," company co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch wrote in a lengthy blog post, "we observed the two Russian espionage groups compromise the same systems and engage separately in the theft of identical credentials."
(Score: 3, Funny) by Geezer on Wednesday June 15 2016, @12:52PM
There are two separate (and not always cooperative) foreign intelligence services in the Russian Federation: the SVR, which is the old KGB 1st Directorate and mostly political, and the military espionage agency, the GRU.
Both are first-rate. Just wait till you see Hillary's emails. :)
(Score: 4, Informative) by jcross on Wednesday June 15 2016, @02:05PM
Even more disturbing to me is the possibility that one or both of these groups is either not Russian, or is Russian but working for someone other than the Russian government. I mean, how can they really know? I'm not sure why that bothers me more, but it seems like a foreign government has every right to try and spy on our political process, but an internal enemy might make more effective use of the resulting data. For instance, let's say some US TLA wants to exert more influence. Wouldn't it be nice to have some dirt in reserve once the presumptive nominee gets elected? Also who's to say they're only exfiltrating data and not infiltrating it? I'm sure you could do a fair bit to hurt a campaign by subtly changing their intel on the opposition so they waste time chasing windmills or even make gaffes in public.
Or, and this gets really twisted, why not a false flag by the DNC itself (or just a report of something that never happened) to cast doubt on damaging information shortly to be released about Hillary? "Yes, those emails are on our servers, but they were planted by those meddling Russians I tell you!" I'm not sure why they'd bother though, since anything big enough to get the public to take interest would drown out a defense requiring that much subtlety. It would be like convincing a jury that the kiddie porn on someone's computer might have been planted there by malware. Ain't gonna happen.
Well, I guess both technology and the government are increasingly becoming black boxes, which forces us to infer what's going on inside from whatever ambiguous data we can collect from the outside. Voting machines, political machines, email server machines, we're in the dark on all of them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday June 15 2016, @06:33PM
Every powerful security apparatus is mainly working for itself. One of the first things the secure is their own autonomy. Then over time the management become more interested in projecting it's own goals than those of it's official external management.
I wish I were being too cynical.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.