Monday, January 2, 2017

The Bait and Switch Government Report on Alleged Russian Hacking of U.S. Elections

Micah Armantrout emails:
Please note this is not from a right leaning website it's from a Tech Centered website that I have followed for more than 10 years.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/did-russia-tamper-with-the-2016-election-bitter-debate-likely-to-rage-on/
Here's a snippet:
Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups....

The sloppiness, [Robert M. Lee, CEO and Founder of the security company Dragos] noted, included the report's conflation of Russian hacking groups APT28 and APT29—also known as CozyBear, Sandworm, Sednit, and Sofacy, among others—with malware names such as BlackEnergy and Havex, and even hacking capabilities such as "Powershell Backdoor." The mix up of such basic classifications does little to inspire confidence that the report was carefully or methodically prepared.
This falls in line with the observations of my own report at EPJ, where the Treasury in conjunction with the White House announcement on sanctions on Russia, announced the sanctions against two common criminal Russian financial hackers who did not do any election-related hacking.

I wrote at the time:
The following statement was issued by the Treasury in conjunction with Obama's statement. Note well: The two sanctioned appear to be bad actor common criminals using cyber techniques and having nothing to do with the Russian government or US elections. Looks like a bit of Obama-Treasury misdirection going on here by adding this to the hacking response.

It appears the government is just throwing all kinds information into the pot that has little or nothing to do with a serious report on alleged Russian electoral hacking.

Suggesting there hasn't been any.

-RW

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