Cyber Crime

The Kremlin candidate, Donald Trump, may very well be ‘Putin’s puppet’

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trump-putin_website-800x430Putin pal Donald Trump may very well be “Putin’s puppet,” the Manchurian Kremlin candidate, according to a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence. Mother Jones reports, A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump:

On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid . . . sent FBI Director James Comey a fiery letter saying the FBI chief may have broken the law and pointed to a potentially greater controversy: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government…The public has a right to know this information.”

Reid’s missive set off a burst of speculation on Twitter and elsewhere. What was he referring to regarding the Republican presidential nominee? At the end of August, Reid had written to Comey and demanded an investigation of the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” and in that letter he indirectly referred to Carter Page, an American businessman cited by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers, who had financial ties to Russia and had recently visited Moscow. Last month, Yahoo News reported that US intelligence officials were probing the links between Page and senior Russian officials.

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FBI says foreign hackers are trying to gain access to election systems

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Screen Shot 2016-08-30 at 1.11.32 PMOn this primary election day in Arizona, there are some disturbing reports about Arizona’s election data base being vulnerable to foreign hackers.

There is also this recently released analysis from the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, ICIT Analysis: Hacking Elections is Easy! Part One: Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (link to .pdf).

Michael Isikoff reports for Yahoo News, FBI says foreign hackers penetrated state election systems:

The FBI has uncovered evidence that foreign hackers penetrated two state election databases in recent weeks, prompting the bureau to warn election officials across the country to take new steps to enhance the security of their computer systems, according to federal and state law enforcement officials.

The FBI warning, contained in a “flash” alert (.pdf) from the FBI’s Cyber Division, a copy of which was obtained by Yahoo News, comes amid heightened concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about the possibility of cyberintrusions, potentially by Russian state-sponsored hackers, aimed at disrupting the November elections.

Those concerns prompted Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to convene a conference call with state election officials on Aug. 15, in which he offered his department’s help to make state voting systems more secure, including providing federal cybersecurity experts to scan for vulnerabilities, according to a “readout” of the call released by the department.

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Election security is now a national security issue

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Some commenters on this blog have been dismissive of the Russian hacks of the DNC, the DCCC, Hack of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ‘Similar’ to DNC Breach, and a Clinton campaign analytical program. Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians, largely on the grounds that the United States engages in cyber spying against the rest of the world, so “what’s the big deal?”

First of all, cyber spying is the foundation of national security in the modern world. The United States would be grossly negligent if it was not doing cyber spying, when every other major country in the world is doing it. How often have we heard since September 11, 2001 “why didn’t our intelligence agencies know this was coming?” This false equivalency argument strikes me as a “blame America first” argument, that the United States deserves it for its own actions. This is not a way to ingratiate yourself with your fellow American citizens.

DieboldSecondly, I’m guessing that many of the people making this argument just a few years ago had their hair on fire about electronic voting machines being hacked to rig elections. (Oh, you know you were).  What makes you think that these Russian hackers will stop with attacks on the Democratic Party? We still have electronic voting systems that are vulnerable to hacking.

Security technologist Bruce Schneier writes, By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines:

Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded.

The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November — that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack.

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Did Trump-Putin 2016 hack the DNC?

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Donald Trump raised eyebrows during the GOP primary when he lavished praise on ‘leader’ Vladimir Putin:

Shirtless PutinDonald Trump praised Vladimir Putin and appeared to defend the autocratic Russian president when pressed about his alleged killing of journalists and political opponents critical of his rule.

One day after Putin called Trump a “bright and talented” and the “absolute leader of the presidential race,” the Republican presidential front-runner returned the compliments, hailing Putin as a “leader” and pointing to his high favorability numbers in Russia.

“He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump said when asked by “Morning Joe” Republican host Joe Scarborough about Putin’s alleged killing of journalists and political opponents.

“I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, a lot of killing, a lot of stupidity,” he said.

Trump noted that Putin had called him smart, which Trump said is “always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.”

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