I was on board with the Russian Hacking story until the MSM got sloppy.

a reply to: vexati0n


Coming to the conclusions that you have-the only point I find you slippily avoided was calling it the 'general consensus' rather than our current Administration/Democrat Party- What do you believe is the intent behind this hyperbole?

a reply to: Pyle

I posted this on another thread but the info in the comment from another site set off some bells if true and it has to do with Crowdstrike and the connections that can be made

Good post OP and quite true for the most part but we should give a shout out and thanks to the trolls and shills because they help sharpen the boards and bring stuff out that might go by un-noticed ....oh and a link but you can skip over the piece and go into the comments where the real action is taking place and some very telling information on the security-what ever that took care of the Clinton/DNC servers and made the report ...you cant make this stuff up www.moonofalabama.org... ETA a comment from the above link :>) Here is an interesting and detailed investigation published by washingtonsblog suggesting that the people framing Russia for the alleged "hacks" are actually ex-patriate Ukrainian ultra-nationalists within the American Democratic party connected to the cyber security firm Crowdstrike of Dmitri Alperovitch www.washingtonsblog.com... Alperovitch in turn is connected to OUNb Ukraine, a supporter organization for the Neo-Nazi wing within the post-coup Ukrainian government, who still celebrate the WWII Nazi mass-murderer Stepan Bandera. He is also connected to the Chalupa family, Irene Chalupa is leader of Ukrainian emigrees, Andrea Chalupa worked for the Euromaidanpress and her sister Alexandra was a research staffer for the Clinton campaign. All of them were said to expect high positions in a Clinton government. Posted by: Eve Human | Jan 6, 2017 3:09:01 PM | 39

originally posted by: banjobrain
I legitimately think Russia and Putin had plenty of reason to want to block Hillary, while promoting a man who has large business ties with Russia.

I'm not aware of any Trump business ties in Russia. Can you elaborate on details?

These are the countries where Trump has businesses in. en.wikipedia.org...

I think the problem with this report is it does not show any evidence. It's like someone claiming he solved Riemann hypothesis but says he cannot show the proof. Does he get the 1 million dollars prize money? I don't think so.

And, even if Russia helped Trump beat Hillary, it's not an attack on America's sovereignty.

Case in point, France helped Henry VII kill Richard III. This does not mean France attacked Britain's sovereignty.

originally posted by: lordcomac
I'm amazed at how many people bought this from the start.

The agenda needs a big war with a big country. The world economy can't survive without it, debt currency is just too broken. Hillary was to start that war.
Now she can't, so they need to do it another way.
About half the population was really mad that she lost (funny how easily they've cut us in half eh) so the lie that it was cheated from her was a good place to start- instant support from half the population.

Why aren't we standing around the white house with torches and pitchforks demanding a ban on propaganda yet? Government is openly lying to us and we don't even care...

no one wants to go to war with Russia. just because we don't want them meddling in our affairs doesn't mean we want war. they don't want war with us either. god damn, ya'll are so pathetic.

if there's a war it will be WITH Russian in the middle east. it's not the lefts agenda it's the rights but you're such pussies you blame everything on the left. so freakin obvious.

a reply to: GodEmperor


we don't want them meddling in our affairs means we HATE them?? how do you figure?


those Macedonian kids they loved ya'll, that's for sure.

originally posted by: knoxie

originally posted by: lordcomac
I'm amazed at how many people bought this from the start.

The agenda needs a big war with a big country. The world economy can't survive without it, debt currency is just too broken. Hillary was to start that war.
Now she can't, so they need to do it another way.
About half the population was really mad that she lost (funny how easily they've cut us in half eh) so the lie that it was cheated from her was a good place to start- instant support from half the population.

Why aren't we standing around the white house with torches and pitchforks demanding a ban on propaganda yet? Government is openly lying to us and we don't even care...

no one wants to go to war with Russia. just because we don't want them meddling in our affairs doesn't mean we want war. they don't want war with us either. god damn, ya'll are so pathetic.

if there's a war it will be WITH Russian in the middle east. it's not the lefts agenda it's the rights but you're such pussies you blame everything on the left. so freakin obvious.

There will be a war.... do not doubt that. When it comes down to it the Russian people and the American people all share the same common values. Call it :The Ten Commandments" if it suits you. The Russian people, just like us go about their lives just as we do.. Get up, goto work, come home.... do it all over again the next day.

They, like us have an islamic problem and just like ours..... it's not getting any better. So if it gets to the point, which history shows over and over that it will, then a war between islamic values and western values becomes necessary to decide on what our planetary direction is going to be... so good relations with Russia are going to be paramount into getting the job done quickly and with minimal causalities.

Cultures battling for survival do not just capitulate and calmly change their ways of thinking. Even when the odd at success are near nill they will continue to remain defiant..... until their peril is self evident, after which they become compliant and cooperative.

Together America and Russia could do great things. We have far more shared values, far more in common with each other than many people realize or are being reminded of. America has not done many things for them to be very trusting of us.
Remember when Russia was asked not to put missiles in Cuba...it made us feel uncomfortable.
Well for a long time now Russia has been asking us not to put missiles on their border because it makes them uncomfortable..... and all they get is a middle finger.

a reply to: knoxie

In other words, you want all news and opinions from other nations to be censored.

Maybe BBC should fall under the spectrum of being censored by America. Oh wait, BBC is pro-liberal bash America rag, they are A-OK by your standards.

Sorry, but the world is becoming increasingly interconnected. The free flow of thoughts and opinions should not be stopped because the diversity of those ideas reveal the corruption and ignorance of liberal ideology.

a reply to: GodEmperor

what the hell are you going on about? you say I hate Russia and want to go to war them because I don't like their meddling. HUGE stretch.

now you're saying I want censorship because some kids in Macedonia know how to get folks click on their nonsense. okay then... wow. LOL.

a reply to: Zimnydran

well, at least you're being honest.

"The Russian people, just like us go about their lives just as we do.. Get up, goto work, come home.... do it all over again the next day. "

of course they do and I doubt they want war either. good lord.

"cultures battling for survival"

oh please, have you looked around lately, we've got it pretty damn good here comparatively. and, we don't have an Islamic problem. putin, trump, tillerson - they just want their oil and that's it. the rich will get richer. it's the game.

a reply to: digital01anarchy

We have the same degree and it took you this long to figure it out? Hillary was hacked by a romanian named guciffer. Podesta email password was password.

"Hillary" wasn't hacked by Guccifer. Guccifer correctly guessed the answers to the password recovery questions for Syndney Blumenthal's AOL account. Podesta's "email password" was not "password." Google doesn't allow users to set their Google account passwords to "password" first and foremost. Secondly, Assange was almost certainly referring to the "p@ssw0rd" email from the Podesta Email archive. See here.

a reply to: nwtrucker

I don't doubt that elements of the current administration are pushing the narrative (it doesn't actually require any insight to see that, they're clearly pushing it in broad daylight). But for me the issue isn't so much that Obama is "behind it", because of course various parties and factions of parties are going to push for a narrative that suits them. It isn't like the Republicans are innocent of this kind of thing, so painting Obama or the DNC as somehow uniquely evil is ridiculous. There is no functional difference between the establishment levels of either party, so I'm not going to waste my time pretending there's a distinction there.

What worries me far more than any agenda from either party is the outrage manufactured by a media industry that is firmly in the grasp of whoever is in power. A year from now, the same media will be disseminating equally false talking points from the Trump administration. The problem isn't that "liberals" or "conservatives" are liars -- of course they are liars. They are politicians. Lying is their job. The problem is that we have sustained an absolute collapse of independent journalism in this country (in the West in general, really).

When it comes to freely available news and information, our choice is between an establishment media with deep ties to the existing power structure and fabricated "news" generated by people and organizations with their own reasons to lie to us. And we eat it up, because thanks to modern technology there is no incentive to expose ourselves to any idea that conflicts with what we want to believe.

a reply to: vexati0n


I agree with your assessment of both parties and wasn't implying otherwise, merely the current manipulation source.

I am, however, skeptical that the media will flip-flop under Trump. At best, perhaps a little lip-service 'balance'. This media hasn't been pro-right in my memory. If ever.

P.S. I would add that I would love to see restrictions lifted so more media outlets, traditional and otherwise, would be avaliable. More media with more options might force a more balanced and competitive environment.

a reply to: vexati0n

That's really all there is. That's all we know for sure. Every other piece of information out there is either media conjecture, insider assumptions, or intelligence community claims that have not been backed up by evidence. There are hints that email was also stolen from the Republican National Committee, which was either not released to WikiLeaks or that WikiLeaks chose not to release publicly, but again, that information is not known to be true - it is based on conversations and statements by people who did not produce any further evidence.

Now, the case for Russian involvement in or leadership in these events hinges on only a couple of things:

Certain unspecified "malware" was (apparently) written with a Cyrillic keyboard. This may or may not be true but is hardly an ironclad case for any "hacking" being carried out by Russians specifically, let alone state-sponsored Russians.
Russian politicians preferred Trump to Hillary. Okay... but everyone's bound to have a preference one way or another, regardless of any other thing. So again, this is circumstantial at best. When dealing with a "hack", you shouldn't even have to involve people's opinions, because there ought to be forensic evidence that make that a moot point. Bringing Russian politicians' political preferences into it really seems like grasping.

That's wrong. The hack was being attributed to Russia back in June by CrowdStrike based on the identification of the threat actors as APT28/APT29 (Fancy Bear/Cozy Bear). There are several threads of evidence supporting this identification.

There's the evidence that has been presented by CrowdStrike including samples of the implants and C2 node IPs on June 14th (updated the 15th): Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee.

Keep in mind that it was CrowdStrike who announced to the world that the hack of the DNC had even occurred and that the "Guccifer 2.0" Wordpress appeared the day after. In that initial blog post, "Guccifer 2.0" not only claims to be the responsible party and posts documents to prove it but also claims that everything had been sent to Wikileaks. The link for that is right here:

The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon.

I guess CrowdStrike customers should think twice about company’s competence.

There's an excellent timeline of events relating to "Guccifer 2.0" in this piece from ThreatConnect

Not only can we confirm that "Guccifer 2.0" was involved in a hack of the DNC because of the documents provided by also because "Guccifer 2.0" provided the login credentials for a DNC staffer to a reporter from The Smoking Gun.

We also now know that the FBI suspected that the DNC was being targetted by the Russians MONTHS before any of that (way back in 2015) and that after failing to communicate that to that to DNC leadership, some flunky contractor was called by an FBI agent who was attempting to alert the DNC — and the dummy didn't believe the FBI agent was legit. Let's set that aside though as the FBI, the FBI agent in question and the IT staffer could all be lying.

Let's also take that CrowdStrike forensic evidence with a grain of salt because CrowdStrike was contracted by the DNC, the FBI didn't examine the servers independently, etc.

There's were other sources that corroborate what we're being told by the DNC, the administration and the intelligence agencies.

First up, we know — ironically enough from an email in the DNC Emails archive @ WL — that at least one DNC staffer was receiving alerts from the Yahoo sec team about possible targeting of her account by foreign threat actors. We also know that the staffer forwarded this alert to her higher ups. See my thread here for details.

Next, we have independent confirmation of the ongoing spearphishing campaign from Dell SecureWorks. This was posted by the team on June 16. The day after Guccifer 2.0 appeared and two days after the CrowdStrike post. (TG-4127 is how SecureWorks identifies APT28/Fancy Bear)

Threat Group-4127 Targets Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign

Democratic National Committee

The U.S. Democratic party's governing body, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), uses the dnc.org domain for its staff email. Between mid-March and mid-April 2016, TG-4127 created 16 short links targeting nine dnc.org email accounts. CTU researchers identified the owners of three of these accounts; two belonged to the DNC's secretary emeritus, and one belonged to the communications director. Four of the 16 short links were clicked, three by the senior staff members. As of this publication, dnc.org does not use the Google Apps Gmail email service. However, because dnc.org email accounts were targeted in the same way as hillaryclinton.com accounts, it is likely that dnc.org did use Gmail at that time and later moved to a different service.

CTU researchers do not have evidence that these spearphishing emails are connected to the DNC network compromise that was revealed on June 14. However, a coincidence seems unlikely, and CTU researchers suspect that TG-4127 used the spearphishing emails or similar techniques to gain an initial foothold in the DNC network.

In the thread I link above, I also mention some threads of evidence that substantiate the claims and come from yet more independent researchers:

Noted security researcher Thomas Rid, professor, Department of War Studies at King’s College London, discovered that a hardcoded IP address for a C2 node from the binaries recovered from the DNC systems (not one of the few included in the IOC table in the CrowdStrike post) was also hardcoded in the samples retreived in the Bundestag hack — 176.31.112[.]10.

Rid also discovered that the same SSL certificate used for encrypting communications with the C2 node in the Bundestag hack was also used for 23.227.196[.]217, the X-Tunnel C2 IP that was previously used for the MIS Department spearphishing site.

[continued in next post]

Why is everyone SO focused on who hacked the DNC? Seriously? Whether it was the 14 year old with nothing better to do, or Russia, is everyone forgetting the revelations of the email content?

You're "democratic" system was cheating you by fellow, corrupted Americans. The DNC got busted! Hello? Anyone wanna address that?

The source of the hack means crap! It's just a diversion.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Oh yes, hired by democrats to 'find' Russian meddling. Interesting how they choose the one company that has a sour outlook with Russia to begin with. Maybe you aren't familiar with what type of innate bias a Russia ex-pat would have when being paid by the DNC to 'find' Russian hacking.

originally posted by: Geki09
Why is everyone SO focused on who hacked the DNC? Seriously? Whether it was the 14 year old with nothing better to do, or Russia, is everyone forgetting the revelations of the email content?

You're "democratic" system was cheating you by fellow, corrupted Americans. The DNC got busted! Hello? Anyone wanna address that?

The source of the hack means crap! It's just a diversion.

Exactly!! They don't want people discussing the content of the leaks!

a reply to: vexati0n

[continued from last post]

Now it's possible that these were planted for folks like Rid to find but now we're getting into the realm of serious tradecraft and keep in mind the samples were released before anyone but CrowdStrike had even stated that the DNC had been hacked. Some of the evidence of the hack goes way back to 2015 (and follows on the heels of the last round of "Pawn Storm" — yet another identifier for APT28/Fancy Bear/TG-4127 — hacks from 2015) so unless SecureWorks is lying and Bitly inserted a bunch of fake shortened links (and the FBI is lying, etc) the trail goes back to 2015.

That completely contradicts the narrative that the claims of a hack are all a cover-up for a leak doesn't it? Consider that the DNC Emails archive on WL has emails all the way up to May 25, 2016. If they were leaving fake breadcrumbs in 2015, that would imply that the folks covering it up knew they there was a leak in 2015 and yet the emails released by WL are many months newer and there were no releases prior.

This doesn't really fit here but regarding forensic evidence found in Bitly links, PwnAllTheThings (Matt Tait), who has also posted quite a lot about the DNC hacks and earlier, points out some of the traces left in the spearphishing campaign that netted Podesta.

There's no dearth of evidence. There's actually quite a lot. So much that trying to put all the pieces together into a coherent picture and then present it in a way that the average person can make any use of it is difficult. I haven't even discussed MO, command & control techniques, etc that all point to specific, known threat actors. Also, I'm getting a little fatigued by the whole mess.

It's a whole helluva lot easier for people to make the inaccurate drive-by claims that there's "no evidence" than it is to refute those claims by showing some of the publicly available evidence.

The DNC was definitely hacked. We know for a fact that Podesta was the victim of a spearphishing attack and even Assange isn't denying that. So those who keep yammering about "it's a leak not a hack!" and continuing to bring up Seth Rich are straight up delusional.

What's less certain is the attribution of the hacks to Russia or rather, the identification of APT28/APT29 as Russian. Here's where the Cyrillic keyboard thing comes in. What is being completely ignored in the criticisms here are:

1. That this identification of these groups as Russian state-sponsored threat actors isn't new.

2. This information isn't a product of the recent investigations. What's been found in recent investigations comports with what was already known.

3. Locale ids and timestamps are only a few threads of evidence in that identification.

I've been pointing people to the 2014 executive summary from FireEye on APT28 because it was one of the earliest and comprehensive breakdowns of the identifications of APT28 — but's it's far from the only one. It draws on 7 years of collected data on the aforementioned and goes into exhaustive detail about the targets of APT28.

Keep in mind that this is all publicly available. This is without any human intel or whatever else the intelligence agencies are keeping classified. There's a lot of evidence that points in one direction and none — absolutely none — that points in any other. Mostly it's just Julian Assange saying "nuh uh! nuh uh!" and various characters casting doubt without actually addressing the heaps of evidence or cherry picking the least conclusive threads of evidence and dismissing them while ignoring the rest.