October 13, 2016 -
SpyTalk: The Russian hacking whodunnit
If Hillary Clinton were Rachel in The Girl on the Train, Vladimir Putin would end up with a corkscrew in his neck. Alas, cyber wars don’t lend themselves to the neat endings of fictional whodunnits, much less most real crimes. Four months after the security firm Crowdstrike revealed that two groups of hackers believed to be based in Russia had penetrated the Democratic National Committee, convincing evidence has yet to surface that the Kremlin is responsible—and it may never. Likewise, security experts said last summer that whoever hacked Hillary Clinton’s private email servers was “far too skilled to leave evidence of their work.”
Nevertheless, the White House, relying on the conclusion of U.S. intelligence that the latest theft of Clinton’s emails originated in Russia, vowed Wednesday to hit back with a “proportional” response that would not be “announced in advance,” in the words of spokesman Josh Earnest. Options could include economic sanctions or diplomatic rebuffs—both problematic because they would entangle allied nations—or tit-for-tat hacks aimed at discomfiting Putin with embarrassing disclosures of the kind Wikileaks has visited on the Democrats. More likely, some experts tell Newsweek on condition of anonymity, the NSA’s stealthy cyber-warriors could zap a few Russian sites with the cyber version of a hit-and-run.
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The Russians, meanwhile, mocked accusations that they hacked the emails (and later the Twitter account) of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. “It’s flattering,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “But it has nothing to be explained by the facts; we have not seen a single proof.” When Amanpour pressed, Lavrov responded like a Cheshire cat. “No, we did not deny this, they did not prove it,” he said.
Credentialed skeptics abound here, too, about the origin of the attacks. Former NSA executive William Binney maintains that U.S. officials “know how many people [beyond the Russians] could have done this but they aren’t telling us anything. All they're doing is promoting another cold war.”
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And it left no trace. Investigators found no “direct evidence” that Clinton’s email account had been “successfully hacked,” FBI Director James B. Comey testified, which “both private experts and federal investigators immediately understood” to mean that “it very likely had been breached, but the intruders were far too skilled to leave evidence of their work,” according to David Sanger, the New York Times cyber expert.
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Dolts all around!
