There are ways to determine the reliability of claims besides looking at who’s saying them. For instance, you could look at things like evidence. In this case there’s abundant evidence publicly available and completely damning that you could familiarize yourself with to have an informed opinion. I’d really recommend trying this approach.
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Makes me wonder whats going on with the Chinese and their famous network of expat spies. If they are bothered by the emerging US/Russian/Taiwan axis, a counter strike may be on the way.
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Didn’t you get the memo? We’re living in the post-truth world. Anyone who respects “evidence” is likely an enemy of the state.
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Very nicely summed up here.
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I would start with the possible social engineering of certain G Men in the FBI. Not hard to steer already right leaning racists…
“Say, who keeps ordering Chinese???”
Not a Party member? Is that so?
It’s time for the NSA to pivot and focus on helping Americans secure their systems.
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USians would have greater chances of this by making home firewalls now than trusting the NSA.
He was a KGB officer in East Germany assigned to work with Stasi and spy on people for chrissake.
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Home firewalls are a great idea. But there are other things that could be done as well. For example, no online service should ever store passwords. No user data (emails, files, etc…) hosted on a commercial server should ever be stored unencrypted. Penalties for failing to report data loss or system breaches should be severe. There should be NIST guidelines for IoT devices. And there are a million other things they could help with as well.
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It feels like there is a new Cold War - and it is the red scare. American v American.
American vs. AmerKKKlan
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I thought we were still afraid of (brown) Muslims this week?
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These are ignorant people whose approach to life and history resembles that of bad 1970s sitcoms: a series of disconnected episodes where things are resolved and normalcy is restored at the end and the events of past episodes are never referenced again in future episodes.
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да ты прав
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Yakov Smirnoff fixed all that.
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In Soviet America, Russian hacks YOU!
WHAT A COUNTRY!
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Everybody seems to be talking about this hacking as if it has happened and is over with.
How many people realize that if it has happened, it is probably still going on? Sure, the perpetrators could try to lay low since there’s increased awareness and scrutiny, but really, hasn’t there been pretty high awareness and scrutiny for many months? Why should now be any different?
So what can be done (or is being done) to counter it now?
On a slightly different track, much as I like to take the high road, I also like to use people’s words against them. Since the vote isn’t completely over yet, what would happen if the electoral college got hacked in some manner? It seems that any party that isn’t currently complaining about hacking charges would have no grounds to dispute an unexpected EC outcome.
I’m not the one to do it, but if Trump called for Russia to hack someone’s email server (okay, I’m taking liberties with his statements, I think), why not call for some other entity to hack something else then?
I’m not saying it should be done, I’m just asking questions. (Go ahead and take the wink ironically, not, recursively, or any combination of the three.)
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The attackers are what’s called an APT/advanced persistent threat. They’re constantly attacking targets, and have been for many years now (they started as part of Russia’s cyberwarfare developments during Russia’s attack on Georgia/Ossetia in 2008). They’re going after every Western nation’s governments and political organizations. They’ve hit Germany quite hard (note the recent Wikileaks dump of the German BND-NSA data to attack Merkel - that coincided with the same profile as the DNC attackers). The techniques used is fairly primitive - email spear phishing, so they’re exploiting non-technical people’s lack of tech savvy. Their approach is to fire off thousands of attacks, wait for one to stick somewhere, and then begin to penetrate and see what they’ve found. They basically got lucky some non-technical person at the DNC clicked a link in an email, and so too with the DCCC, Podesta’s office, etc.
There are things that can be done to mitigate - enforcing secure client settings, IDS, security awareness training of users, various kinds of filters on mail servers, etc. Unfortunately every site/org/etc. would need to harden their systems and train their users, and for the most part their IT’s ad hoc garbage with poor information security policies. Some parts of the DHS have been trying to help with advice/assistance in hardening, but some orgs. fear their involvement and spurn their offers.
Since the EC is 538 individuals from various walks of life and on institutional organization, an attacker would need to have 538 separate attack plans and a lot of luck. Were they to hack one of them and gather personal info that was embarrassing they could blackmail them, though. That’s been Russia’s standard MO for years for dealing with political threats. They seem to have worked out that Wikileaks is a valuable bullhorn for attacks from their intelligence agencies.
He said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily…” So it was a bit evasive, but still seriously over the line.
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