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Russian Hackers Allegedly Attempted To Breach the DNC After the 2018 Midterms (fortune.com) 127

Posted by BeauHD from the surprise-surprise dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Russian hackers attempted to breach Democratic National Committee email addresses in a spear-phishing campaign just after the 2018 midterms, according to a DNC court document filed Thursday night. "The content of these emails and their timestamps were consistent with a spear-phishing campaign that leading cybersecurity experts have tied to Russian intelligence," reads the complaint. "Therefore, it is probable that Russian intelligence again attempted to unlawfully infiltrate DNC computers in November 2018." The complaint [...] said there is no evidence that the attempted hack in Nov. 2018 was successful.

Spear-phishing campaigns involve sending emails that appear to be from a trusted source in order to gain confidential information. According to CNN, the emails in question appeared to have been sent from a State Department official and contained a PDF attachment that, if opened, would allow the hacker access to the recipient's computer. The timing and content of these emails were consistent with the practices of the Russian hacking group known as Cozy Bear, one of the two groups that hacked the DNC prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. According to the cybersecurity firm FireEye, Cozy Bear attempted to hack over 20 entities in Nov. 2018, including clients in local government, transportation, defense, law enforcement, and military.
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Russian Hackers Allegedly Attempted To Breach the DNC After the 2018 Midterms More

Russian Hackers Allegedly Attempted To Breach the DNC After the 2018 Midterms

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  • omg (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    orange man good

  • Fake News (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 18, 2019 @06:23PM (#57984468)

    The Russians and the Chinese try to hack EVERYONE. All the major corporations, no matter what they produce. All the politicians, no matter what their party. All the banks, all the universities, all the tech firms - all of it.

    Trying to play off standard, everyday behaviors as special and indicative of something deeper, as is done here. turns normal news into storytime fiction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This is untrue.

      Any org with anything valuable is hardened against these attacks. Especially the DNC after they were hacked before.

      To get in now requires significant resources. Directed phishing attacks, zero day exploits, skilled operators. The Russians only have so many of them and they can't be hacking every major corporation, all the politicians, all the banks, all the universities, all the tech firms, all of it at once.

      They choose where to direct their resources. And naturally when Trump was weakened by

  • I only hear claims. How can they be sure it did not come from somewhere else? It's trivial to reroute though other computers in the same country or other countries. I can not see how the US can be aware of every single connection going in and out of every country...(probabilistic matching incoming and outgoing streams to determine proxies). Russia and China along with other not quite US friendly countries in that region have direct connections. But supposing they did there are ways to disguise the data to

    • Shh this is slashdot, we don't get into all that technical stuff. Plus were trying to bash trump here some more.. cmon man..

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      What sort of evidence are you expecting to see? System logs? Mail dumps from peoples' inboxes? Testimony from sysadmins?

      And if someone was to take you aside and show you this evidence, would your viewpoint change, or would you dismiss it as 'easily faked'?

      Perhaps it is just the nature of the Internet, and hacking, that evidence cannot be conveyed across it in a way that would meet your demands. If so, then it's hardly surprising that you have "only heard claims", since that is all you are able to hear f

      • That's a good point. The DNC and by association their paid consultants are so untrustworthy that the burden of proof for any of their claims to be taken seriously is probably insurmountable. There is no benefit of the doubt to be granted to an organization where rule number one is that the ends justify the means, of which history has shown time and time again.

        3rd party that doesn't have a conflict of interest to provide testimony or evidence to collaborate? That's a start. Same for both sides.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Just add the bit that was censored out. 'People with IP addresses in the Russian IP address range', of course that don't sell anything and of course once it hits Russia, they don't know anything beyond that, the person could be next door and route it all over the place, with servers rented in Russia from Australia or in China from Japan. All meaningless twaddle. Fuck Americans complain and phishing attacks when they are launching actual missiles and cleaning people all over the world, ohh boo hoo, your idio

  • It was a US domestic political event with a human walking out with data to give to the media.
    A Pentagon paper event totally internal to the USA and US politics.
    Random spear-phishing attempts did not move data out as it was done by a person in person.
  • I think at this point, anyone who doesn't take an overall look at Russian operations all over the world, and the general ambitions of Vladimir Putin, who doesn't see that this is all a form of guerrilla warfare isn't paying close enough attention, is in denial, or is one of their extraterritorial operatives whitewashing the whole thing. What we're seeing are just the early stages of the overall agenda and gameplan.

    • When the DNC was hacked in 2016, Democrats themselves said there was nothing of significance in those emails. And there wasn't. With both parties airing their craziness out in the open (with Dems heavily in the lead, by my opinion), I can't imagine what 2018 DNC or RNC email hack would have changed.

      • I'll say the same thing I said to the AC above you but in a nicer way: I believe things like this to be an overall campaign of destabilizing Western countries which can be nothing but beneficial to governments like Russia and China, both of which have expansionist ambitions. It doesn't matter what data they did or did not get, what does matter is that they're creating chaos and distrust and helping create divisiveness. Just here in the U.S. we've got half the country looking to '''stick it''' to the other h

        • Consider that Western societies have reached a level of neuroticism not seen since the time of Victorian England, with its deadly catalyst in the form of social media. Take a look at anything non-Trump, non-politics related to see how quickly people get upset and divided over it. Those can't all be Russians. And even when it is politics, you have say the image of Cathy Griffin holds Trump's mock severed head spreading over social media and people get worked up to a frenzy -- you don't need Russians for that

          • ..okay, you also are not getting it. Read this other comment: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org] these things don't need to be created out of wholecloth by foreign operatives, in fact it works better if it's NOT '''created''' by them, they just use resentment that's already there to start with.

            • You're making it sound like there's merely resentment underneath the surface and the operatives are exploiting it to turn it into a crisis. Whereas I'm saying there is a half-madness going on and what operatives do is no more than a noise.

              It's the difference akin to psychologically pressuring a vulnerable person vs. taunting a deranged person in the street.

              • I see that whereas I'm attempting to analyze what I see and read from various news sources in as objective and unbiased a way as possible, you're clinging to your own personal beliefs, biases, and opinions. As such we can't have a real conversation about this subject because you've clearly already made up your mind already. Good-bye.

  • Good, maybe someone in the FSB will be able to figure out the Dems political strategy, 'cause I sure can't.

  • You know (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Friday January 18, 2019 @09:15PM (#57985222)

    The problem with lying, and getting caught, is it tends to wreak havoc on your credibility.

    After the BS they pulled with Bernie / Hillary, they are naive ( or arrogant ) to believe that anyone will ever put any faith
    into any story they wish to tell. The doubt will be there again in 2020 when they nominate their next candidate and you
    can be sure Team Red* is going to make sure everyone and their brother remembers it.

    *Not that Team Red is the poster child of truthfulness, mind you, but they will surely throw some fuel on that fire.

    At what point will the people decide that the only way forward is to remove the cancer that is our entrenched elected leadership
    and start from scratch ? It seems the only ones who have been getting screwed over for the past several decades are us . . . . .

    It's a shame the US doesn't have the " No Confidence " rule to remove an incompetent / incapable government.

  • “According to CNN, the emails in question appeared to have been sent from a State Department official and contained a PDF attachment that, if opened, would allow the hacker access to the recipient's computer.”

    Really, it's for such insightful technical analysis that keeps me coming back here. Would this PDF attachment run a script that hacked a Microsoft Windows computer? The rest of the story is merely the usual neocon waffle, part of the strategy to provoke the next cold war with Russia.

  • No actual evidence for the so-called DNC hack (Score:5, Informative)

    by najajomo ( 4890785 ) on Friday January 18, 2019 @09:42PM (#57985356)
    Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak — an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system [thenation.com].

    ‘ To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” ’

    • Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak — an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system [thenation.com].

      ‘ To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” ’

      Seriously?

      That article is preceded by a giant editorial essay basically saying:

      "Hey! We only published this thing because we think it's important to ask more questions about the topic! Oh, and it turns out the article author actually misrepresented parts of the report, and the group that released the report actually had a lot reservations about publishing it!!"

      The evidence that it was a Russian hack continues to be pretty overwhelming.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbn-o ( 555068 )

        Bill Binney's group seems convinced the other way and makes a compelling case that the DNC's network connection wasn't fast enough for the data transfer to have been sent from the DNC to someone in Russia over the Internet. You cite no evidence to support your conclusion. You repeated a summary we're supposed to take for granted (given the repetition in corporate-friendly media) where every Russiagate story turns out to be completely untrue (such as Russians allegedly compromised the American power network

        • Bill Binney's group seems convinced the other way

          And virtually everybody in the US intelligence apparatus disagrees with him.

          makes a compelling case that the DNC's network connection wasn't fast enough for the data transfer to have been sent from the DNC to someone in Russia over the Internet

          No they don't, they're morons.

          The metadata showing a 22.5 Mb/s transfer rate doesn't prove the files were downloaded from the DNC using a USB stick, it proves they were likely downloaded to (or from) a USB stick at some point.

          And if I were a remotely competent hacker I'd be doing the same thing I do when connecting to a customer installation. Working from a computer on an airgapped Network.

          And how do you move files back and forth fr

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbn-o ( 555068 )

            And virtually everybody in the US intelligence apparatus disagrees with him.

            The only statement we have which tries to make the opinion (an "assessment") from the Obama administration which I can't find anyone who seriously believes; nobody believes all of those agencies agree on anything much less that opinion. Sy Hersh says as much [theintercept.com] when he talked about that assessment and the media's lacking coverage of it ("What does an assessment mean? It's not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate

            • The only statement we have which tries to make the opinion (an "assessment") from the Obama administration which I can't find anyone who seriously believes;

              Then pull your head out of the Fox News/Infowars bubble. The only people who "don't believe" the assessment are the people who worry that significant Russian interference delegitimizes Trump's presidency (which it kinda does).

              Even the ostensible source of Russiagate stories—alleged collusion between some Russians and the Trump campaign—isn't looking so rosy [politico.com] for proponents anymore

              LOL [youtube.com]

              Sources and evidence, not namecalling, are required to sustain convincing arguments.

              The evidence that they're morons is they presented the timestamps as proof, apparently not realizing a USB transfer likely came AFTER the remote download.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jbn-o ( 555068 )

                "likely came AFTER" comes with no evidence to justify the assertion of likelihood. Again. And this evidenceless assertion as we get yet another Russiagate "bombshell" from anonymous sources (this time with Robert Mueller, Russiagate-supporter's hero, saying it's not so). In the end the DNC emails still strike me as a relatively minor detail overshadowed by the importance of what those emails said. In other words, the DNC emails continue to be consistent with someone on the inside leaking them, but regardles

                • "likely came AFTER" comes with no evidence to justify the assertion of likelihood. Again.

                  So? There's a ton of other evidence suggesting Russia hacked the DNC emails. The major piece of counter-evidence is the USB transfer which is meaningless.

                  And this evidenceless assertion as we get yet another Russiagate "bombshell" from anonymous sources (this time with Robert Mueller, Russiagate-supporter's hero, saying it's not so).

                  Yeah, it sounds like the reporter somehow got it wrong. And unlike the Fox News / Infowars alternate reality when Mueller says something it's probably accurate, and when the MSM realizes the story is probably wrong they drop it.

  • I'm not sure who I'm more disgusted with, the anonymous pansy who shared this nonsense or SlashDot for keeping the Russophobia ball going to the detriment of U.S. credibility. I'll tell you this though, I wish Microsoft and Amazon's attempts at penetrating my network were as infrequently as those of the Russians. My log files tell me who my enemies are and Russia is NOT one of them.
  • Amazing how much more secure the firewall is when you stop using the default administrator password.

  • Far too many are prepared to up play, down play, blame the victim for short term political advantage.

    When will people wise up and recognise that Putin is one of world's biggest threats to the freedom we enjoy in the west?

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