NYT: Donald Trump Encourages Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails

Morat20 in reply to greginak says:

I think the best summation is “Tldr: this “lone hacker” uses many VMs, speaks Russian; username is founder of USSR secret police & likes laundering docs via Wikileaks.”

Some more interesting stuff:

The first fact is that the Guccifer 2 account, despite being ostensibly a lone Eastern European hacker, is totally out of character for lone hackers. For a start, most lone hackers show a huge sense of bravado and self-aggrandizement which is a role the Guccifer2 character acts very poorly. Even his hacker pseudonym “Guccifer2” references another hacker rather than choosing his own brand to operate under. Despite having his own outlet, Guccifer2 allowed his most impactful stolen documents to be laundered by another outlet, and stands idly by when that outlet spreads disinformation about his involvement.

Moreover, the quality of his English varies dramatically, even between sections of the same document when swapping between paragraphs that are more political to ones that are more technical, and he makes basic technical errors that sound an awful lot like a linguist misunderstanding a technical person, than a mistranslation. To top it all off, the hacker seems unable to explain how he hacked the DNC in any detail, and rather than bragging about how he technically hacked the DNC, he makes statements about it that make no technical sense.

In short, the notion that the hacker is an individual rather than an organization such as a foreign intelligence agency strains credulity beyond breaking point.

The second important fact is that the stolen documents were leaked en masse at all. There’s lots of capable foreign intelligence organizations that would plausibly hack the US to get dirt on senior Democrats, but mass-dumping stolen or intercepted political data to influence the public media has all the hallmarks of a Russian information influence operation. Other countries, of course, wouldn’t hesitate to use documents obtained via foreign intelligence for political advantage, or even maybe for HUMINT advantage, but mass-dumping intercepted documents is a Rubicon most foreign intelligence agencies simply do not cross.

The third fact is technical; uncovered by cybersecurity expert and author Thomas Rid, showing that the malware control servers used in the DNC hack are the same computers as the malware control servers used in the hack of the German Parliament a few years ago.

It’s an important link and one that’s hard to fake. It ties the DNC hack to a much larger series of hacks, including against NATO, Georgia, human rights and Russian military monitoring groups in Syria, ministries of foreign affairs in Europe, and so on. It’s also important because the Bundestag hack was attributed by the head of Germany’s BfV intelligence to be Russian intelligence.

In the game of attribution, there’s no such thing as “proof”; only a body of evidence that combine to form an overall assessment; but the link between the DNC malware servers and the Bundestag malware servers is about as close to “proof” as it comes.

(bolding mine)Report