Closer than we thought?

The headline jumped out at me and I thought it a good idea to post it here. The original story was posted by Tim Peacock at Peacock Panache. They source the following article on Motherboard by Thomas Rid: All Signs Point to Russia Being Behind the DNC Hack.

I think by now, it’s a foregone conclusion that the bad actors that Wikileaks is releasing information from are state-sponsored and are from Russia. Putin has made no secret of his political love for Trump™ and Republicans have used the occasion to make great hay over the DNC and it’s terse relationship with Bernie. . . .not out of true concern for Sanders, of course, but because they have had to embrace a very undesirable candidate as their standard-bearer.

The big takeaway from the Motherboard article is the following:

The metadata in the leaked documents are perhaps most revealing: one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named “Феликс Эдмундович,” a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka, memorialised in a 15-ton iron statue in front of the old KGB headquarters during Soviet times. The original intruders made other errors: one leaked document included hyperlink error messages in Cyrillic, the result of editing the file on a computer with Russian language settings. After this mistake became public, the intruders removed the Cyrillic information from the metadata in the next dump and carefully used made-up user names from different world regions, thereby confirming they had made a mistake in the first round. Then there is the language issue. “I hate being attributed to Russia,” the Guccifer 2.0 account told Motherboard, probably accurately. The person at the keyboard then claimed in a chat with Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai that Guccifer 2.0 was from Romania, like the original Guccifer, a well-known hacker. But when asked to explain his hack in Romanian, he was unable to respond colloquially and without errors. Guccifer 2.0’s English initially was also weak, but in subsequent posts the quality improved sharply, albeit only on political subjects, not in technical matters—an indication of a team of operators at work behind the scenes.

Rid went on to add:

The metadata show that the Russian operators apparently edited some documents, and in some cases created new documents after the intruders were already expunged from the DNC network on June 11. A file called donors.xls, for instance, was created more than a day after the story came out, on June 15, most likely by copy-pasting an existing list into a clean document. Although so far the actual content of the leaked documents appears not to have been tampered with, manipulation would fit an established pattern of operational behaviour in other contexts, such as troll farms or planting fake media stories. Subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation of content may be in the interest of the adversary in the future. Documents that were leaked by or through an intelligence operation should be handled with great care, and journalists should not simply treat them as reliable sources.

Tim at Peacock Panache expands on this further and in spectacular fashion:

Instead of fighting Assange about releasing the material, it should be pointed out that not only is Assange using the Wikileaks platform in a personal vendetta against Hillary Clinton, he’s doing so with information that may have been altered and is therefore not trustworthy. First rule of real journalism: Make sure your sources can be trusted.

Edit: Made the Recommended List. . .First time ever! Thanks, Kossacks!

Update: This from the New York Times —

“American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.

But intelligence officials have cautioned that they are uncertain whether the electronic break-in at the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage — of the kind the United States also conducts around the world — or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.

The emails were released by WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, has made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency. It is unclear how the documents made their way to the group. But a large sampling was published before the WikiLeaks release by several news organizations and someone who called himself “Guccifer 2.0,” who investigators now believe was an agent of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service.

Such a public accusation could result in a further deterioration of the already icy relationship between Washington and Moscow, at a moment when the administration is trying to reach an accord with Mr. Putin on a cease-fire in Syria and on other issues. It could also doom any effort to reach some kind of agreement about acceptable behavior in cyberspace, of the kind the United States has been discussing with China.

In an interview with Savannah Guthrie of NBC News on Tuesday, President Obama stopped short of accusing Russian agencies from seeking to manipulate the election but said “Anything's possible.”

He noted that “on a regular basis, they try to influence elections in Europe.”

The rest of the article can be found here: nyti.ms/...