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A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy.
It was hard to see the perniciousness of this attack at first, especially given how news media initially covered the story. The Russians, after all, didn’t knock out a power grid. And when the stolen information arrived, it was dressed in the ideology of WikiLeaks, which presents its exploits as possessing a kind of journalistic bravery the traditional media lacks.
Fox News contributor George Will says GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump will not release his tax returns because they may show "he is deeply involved in dealing with Russia oligarchs."
The claim — which Will could not support with any tangible proof — was made to Bret Baier on Fox News's "Special Report" live from the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on Monday night. The topic was raised after some Democratic Party officials, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, attempted to connect the Republican presidential nominee to a leak of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails.
The Friday release by WikiLeaks of those emails, which appear to show an effort by DNC officials to lead a campaign against Clinton's primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), led to the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who will step down after the convention.
"Both the campaign chair and anybody you talk to, including Sen. [Chris] Murphy [D-Conn.] would not go down that road once pressed on the connection between Russia and the Trump campaign," said Baier. "But they have thrown it out there. George?"
"Well, it's the sort of thing we might learn if we saw the candidate's tax returns," Will responded. "Perhaps one more reason why we're not seeing his tax returns — because he is deeply involved in dealing with Russian oligarchs and others. Whether that's good, bad or indifferent, it's probably the reasonable surmise."
It was the keyboards that gave them away. Russian hackers, typing on keyboards configured in Cyrillic and doing it in a time zone consistent with Moscow, created the “eloquent” code that breached the computers of the Democratic National Committee, according to a top analyst who investigated the hack.
“This was absolutely not an amateur operation … When you look at the totality of all those pieces and you put them together, it kind of paints a really good picture of who the actor was,” Michael Buratowski, the senior vice president of cybersecurity services at Fidelis Cybersecurity, told ABC News Monday. “I come from a law enforcement background, and it’s [about being] beyond a reasonable doubt. And I would say it’s beyond a reasonable doubt … I’m very confident that the malware that we looked at [was from] Russian actors.”
“When we looked at the malware, we found that it was very, very eloquent in its design as well as its functionality — very advanced, not something that script user or lower level hacker would be able to really generate or customize,” he said.
Buratowski said IP addresses linked to the attack were associated with Russian servers. A U.S. official said that it appeared that the hackers never worked on Russian holidays.
And not least to consider, Buratowski said, was the target and timing of the WikiLeaks postingon Friday — which made public 20,000 emails from the pilfered computers.
“We know for a fact that the malicious actors were in there and had access to this data for some time,” he said. “The timing of the release of information from WikiLeaks is very suspect. When you look at it — it was released right before the [Democratic] convention — you have to question what the motivation was behind that.”
Buratowski’s firm was one of three independent cybersecurity firms brought in by another firm, Crowdstrike, to analyze parts of malware that infected computers belonging to the Democratic National Committee. Last month Crowdstrike, which was first to analyze the attack, fingered two Russian hacker groups that the firm said were working for two rival Russian intelligence agencies.
When, not if, Trump and the Pootin are busted, this will make Watergate look like a umm, tea party?
And have any of our tightie righties condemned The Pootin for this?
A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy.
It was hard to see the perniciousness of this attack at first, especially given how news media initially covered the story. The Russians, after all, didn’t knock out a power grid. And when the stolen information arrived, it was dressed in the ideology of WikiLeaks, which presents its exploits as possessing a kind of journalistic bravery the traditional media lacks.
Putin is keeping tight lipped. The Russians plan to blackmail Hillary with the emails should she become President.When, not if, Trump and the Pootin are busted, this will make Watergate look like a umm, tea party?
And have any of our tightie righties condemned The Pootin for this?
A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy.
It was hard to see the perniciousness of this attack at first, especially given how news media initially covered the story. The Russians, after all, didn’t knock out a power grid. And when the stolen information arrived, it was dressed in the ideology of WikiLeaks, which presents its exploits as possessing a kind of journalistic bravery the traditional media lacks.
