the "Russian hacking" story..

On January 8, 2016, Marcel Lehel Lazar, known as Guccifer, the Romanian taxi driver, extradited to the US, pleaded guilty to identity theft and a number of computer systems hacking charges including breaking into about 100 American's email accounts including former Secretary of State, breaking into Clinton's private e-mail server at her New York residence and DNC servers, and was sentenced by US Virginia District Judge, James Cacheris, to 52 months in prison.

Lazar is serving his sentence in Romanian state own penitentiary institution in the suburbs of Bucharest. Lazar had no formal computer training or expertise, apparently he started his hacking activities in 2006.

He claims to guess people's passwords after reviewing Wikipedia data (!!!) about them. As an amateur "hacker" he proven to be a smart and resourceful person, however like almost all amateurs in this business ended in jail.

As early as in the fall of 2015, Wikileaks were in a possession of Blumenthal, Clinton and later Podesta (separate case) emails.

First batch of Clinton emails was published by Wikileaks March 16, 2016, DNC emails in July and Podesta archives in October.

In June 2016, Gawker published a document allegedly "hacked" from DNC server with a title: "Donald Trump Report", 200 pages document circulated among Clinton senior election staff and senior DNC staff. The document—which according to embedded metadata was created by a Democratic strategist named Warren Flood—was created on December 19th, 2015, and emailed to Gawker by ....“Guccifer,” the notorious Romanian hacker, well, there is a small problem here since Gucciffer was already serving his sentence in jail.

In the same time, the DNC hack was first revealed. The cyber security firm CrowdStrike announced that it had discovered "two hacking collectives, linked to Russian intelligence", inside the DNC network after the DNC reported a suspected breach. In a blog post, the company identified the groups as “COZY BEAR” and “FANCY BEAR”—

two “sophisticated adversaries” that “engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation.” Wow, fast conclusion and it sounds like political statement born at State Department offices...

This statement was backed up by an apparent fact that metadata associated with the copy !!! of the original file, was last saved by someone named (in Cyrillic letters) “Felix Edmundovich,” maybe be a reference to the historical Soviet figure known as “Iron Felix,” .   

CrowdStrike provided also an analysis of the "sophisticated" malware allegedly used by "Russian" hackers. (can be located at few sites)

Summarising, we have "sophisticated" malware and cleverly crafted, copy (not an original ???) of the report but with strange "Cyrillic" footprint....therefore conveniently and indubitably pointing to Russian hackers.... Well, sounds good, or rather too good to be truth. Claims that attack on DNC could only be originated by Russian hackers simply because they relied on the same malware that was used to hack Deutsche Bundestag and TV5Monde doesn't make sense since full source code for the X-Agent implant has long been associated with APT28 and can be obtained by anyone from antivirus provider Eset.

If Eset could do it, so can others. It is both foolish and completely baseless to claim, as CrowdStrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the Russian govs or its affiliates when the source code is there for anyone to get it and use at will.

And we are sure that "some" on this continent use it, regardless of local gov affiliation.

The open question remains who in fact emailed (if) "Trump report" to Gawker, a social media outlet which... doesn't exist anymore.

We are sure that intel agents already asked this question to Gawker former owner and his staff, answers no avail. Maybe it is a good idea to ask BlackRock's Aladdin® system for an advice...

Out theory here is less complicated and fully domesticated, but maybe another time....

Discussion about hacking almost successfully diverted attention from the exposed mount Everest of corruption and criminal activities at DNC/Clinton camp.

Hacking into someone's data is an obviously bad thing, however sometimes, like in this case, it turned to be the only way to expose crime and corruption at the top of American political establishment.

The game, however, is far from over, read below statements, just a few from many...

·     Former CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New YorkTimes and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting

    agent of the Russian Federation.”  

• Bush’s CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”
• Senator Chuck Schumer issued an open threat to Trump during an interview: "they (CIA) have 6 ways on Sunday to get back and get you"  so even for practical reasons he (Trump) was really dumb to do this (not trusting intel community)
• Democratic (ret) leader Reid: "give trump "fake" intel briefings" (interview given after rep convention nominated trump)
• Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recent statement: "you are not republican and you're not a patriot if you're celebrating Trump victory".....

And for those with short memory

 

• Collin Powell Feb 5, 2003 speech to UN Security Counsel: "16 intel agencies confirmed that Hussain has weapons of mass destruction,...conclusions based on solid intelligence"..... since then 3 countries were completely destroyed, militarily and economically, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced...
• China state agencies stole in 2015 huge number of documents and data from various government sites, and intel was able to point out to the... government office building in China where this operation was run from. It wasn't any desire then to go to war with China and case quietly died within a few days.