Het was al lang duidelijk dat de bewering voor het Russische hacken van het DNC (Democratic National Committee) en het e-mail account van Podesta was gefundeerd op los zand en vooral was gebaseerd op de wil Rusland aan te wijzen als de grote boosdoener voor het verlies van de Democratische Partij in de VS presidentsverkiezingen, november vorig jaar.
Zeer tegen de zin van de VS, heeft Rusland zich internationaal ('uiteraard' niet in het westen) een positie verworven, die als betrouwbaar wordt gezien, dit i.t.t. de VS, als gevolg van VS inmenging in diverse buitenlanden en de grootscheepse terreur o.a. middels illegale oorlogen, die dit 'land' o.a. in het Midden-Oosten en Afrika begon.
Anti-Media bracht afgelopen zaterdag een artikel, waaruit duidelijk is op te maken, hoe de vork echt in de steel steekt, en dat (nogmaals: zoals bekend), Rusland niets met hacken of andere manipulaties van de verkiezingen te maken had!!
Het cyberbeveiligingsbedrijf dat de gegevens gaf voor de bewering dat het DNC en de mail van Podesta door de Russen zijn gehackt, Crowdstrike, heeft prutswerk geleverd en dat in één dag tijd..!!! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Crowdstrike heeft de zaak uitgelegd in de context van 'de Russen hebben 't gedaan.....' Lullig genoeg was juist de democratische presidentskandidaat Sanders, het slachtoffer van smerige manipulaties binnen de Democratische Partij, door de top van die partij!!
ESET, een ander cyberbeveiligingsbedrijf legt in het artikel uit wat Crowdstrike (expres) fout heeft gedaan. Het malware 'programma' X-Agent, dat volgens Crowdstrike werd gebruikt, is NB in handen gekomen van ESET, na onderzoek van TV5 Monde, de Bundestag en het DNC.......
Nogmaals, de conclusie van het volgende artikel is geen verrassing, de inhoud is dat echter wel degelijk!!
Oordeel zelf:
The
Evidence That Russia Hacked the DNC Is Collapsing
The Evidence That Russia Hacked the DNC Is Collapsing
(ANTIWAR Op-Ed) The
allegation – now accepted as incontrovertible fact by the
“mainstream” media – that the Russian intelligence services
hacked the Democratic National Committee (and John Podesta’s
emails) in an effort to help Donald Trump get elected recently
suffered a blow from which it may not recover.
Crowdstrike
is the cybersecurity company hired by the DNC to determine who hacked
their accounts: it took them a single day to determine the identity
of the culprits – it was, they
said,
two groups of hackers which they named “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy
Bear,” affiliated respectively with
the GRU, which is Russian military intelligence, and the FSB, the
Russian security service.
How
did they know this?
These
alleged “hacker groups” are not associated with any known
individuals in any way connected to Russian intelligence: instead,
they are identified by the tools they use, the times they do their
dirty work, the nature of the targets, and other characteristics
based on the history of past intrusions.
Yet
as Jeffrey Carr and other
cyberwarfare experts have
pointed out, this methodology is fatally flawed. “It’s important
to know that the process of attributing an attack by a cybersecurity
company has nothing to do with the scientific method,” writes
Carr:
“Claims
of attribution aren’t testable or repeatable because the hypothesis
is never proven right or wrong. Neither are claims of attribution
admissible in any criminal case, so those who make the claim don’t
have to abide by any rules of evidence (i.e., hearsay, relevance,
admissibility).”
Likening
attribution claims of hacking incidents by cybersecurity companies to
intelligence assessments, Carr notes that, unlike government agencies
such the CIA, these companies are never held to account for their
misses:
“When
it comes to cybersecurity estimates of attribution, no one holds the
company that makes the claim accountable because there’s no way to
prove whether the assignment of attribution is true or false unless
(1) there is a criminal conviction, (2) the hacker is caught in
the act, or (3) a government employee leaked the
evidence.”
This
lack of accountability may be changing, however, because
Crowdstrike’s case for attributing the hacking of the DNC to the
Russians is falling apart at the seams like a cheap sweater.
To
begin with, Crowdstrike initially gauged its certainty as to the
identity of the hackers with “medium
confidence.”
However, a later development, announced in late December and touted
by the Washington
Post,
boosted this to “high confidence.” The reason for this newfound
near-certainty was their discovery that “Fancy Bear” had also
infected an application used by the Ukrainian military to target
separatist artillery in the Ukrainian civil war. As
the Post reported:
“While
CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to investigate the intrusions
and whose findings are described in a new report, had always
suspected that one of the two hacker groups that struck the DNC was
the GRU*, Russia’s military intelligence agency, it had only medium
confidence.
“Now,
said CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, ‘we have high
confidence’ it was a unit of the GRU. CrowdStrike had dubbed that
unit ‘Fancy Bear.’”
Crowdstrike published an
analysis that claimed a malware program supposedly unique to Fancy
Bear, X-Agent, had infected a Ukrainian targeting application and,
using GPS to geo-locate Ukrainian positions, had turned the
application against the Ukrainians, resulting in huge losses:
“Between
July and August 2014, Russian-backed forces launched some of the
most-decisive attacks against Ukrainian forces, resulting in
significant loss of life, weaponry and territory.
“Ukrainian
artillery forces have lost over 50% of their weapons in the two years
of conflict and over 80% of D-30 howitzers, the highest percentage of
loss of any other artillery pieces in Ukraine’s arsenal.”
Alperovitch told the
PBS News Hour that “Ukraine’s artillery men were targeted by the
same hackers, that we call Fancy Bear, that targeted DNC, but this
time they were targeting cell phones to try to understand their
location so that the Russian artillery forces can actually target
them in the open battle. It was the same variant of the same
malicious code that we had seen at the DNC.”
He told NBC
News that this proved the DNC hacker “wasn’t a 400-pound guy in
his bed,” as
Trump had opined during
the first presidential debate – it was the Russians.
The
only problem with this analysis is that is isn’t true. It turns out
that Crowdstrike’s estimate of Ukrainian losses was based on a blog
post by
a pro-Russian blogger eager to tout Ukrainian losses: the
Ukrainians denied it.
Furthermore, the hacking attribution was based on the hackers’ use
of a malware program called X-Agent, supposedly unique to Fancy Bear.
Since the target was the Ukrainian military, Crowdstrike extrapolated
from this that the hackers were working for the Russians.
All
somewhat plausible, except for two things: To begin with, as Jeffrey
Carr pointed
out in
December, and now others are beginning to realize, X-Agent isn’t
unique to Fancy Bear.
Citing
the findings of ESET, another cybersecurity company, he wrote:
“Unlike
Crowdstrike, ESET doesn’t assign APT28/Fancy Bear/Sednit to a
Russian Intelligence Service or anyone else for a very simple reason.
Once malware is deployed, it is no longer under the control of the
hacker who deployed it or the developer who created it. It can be
reverse-engineered, copied, modified, shared and redeployed again and
again by anyone. In other words – malware deployed is malware
enjoyed!
“In
fact, the source code for X-Agent, which was used in the DNC,
Bundestag, and TV5Monde attacks, was obtained by ESET as
part of their investigation!
“During
our investigations, we were able to retrieve the complete Xagent
source code for the Linux operating system….”
“If
ESET could do it, so can others. It is both foolish and baseless to
claim, as Crowdstrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the
Russian government when the source code is there for anyone to find
and use at will.”
Secondly,
the estimate Crowdstrike used to verify the Ukrainian losses was
supposedly based on data from the respected International Institute
for Strategic Studies (IISS). But now IISS is disavowing
and debunking
their claims:
“[T]he International
Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)
told [Voice of America] that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data
as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the
CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed
combat losses and hacking never happened….
“’The
CrowdStrike report uses our data, but the inferences and analysis
drawn from that data belong solely to the report’s authors,” the
IISS said. “The inference they make that reductions in Ukrainian
D-30 artillery holdings between 2013 and 2016 were primarily the
result of combat losses is not a conclusion that we have ever
suggested ourselves, nor one we believe to be accurate.’
“
One
of the IISS researchers who produced the data said that while the
think tank had dramatically lowered its estimates of Ukrainian
artillery assets and howitzers in 2013, it did so as part of a
‘reassessment” and reallocation of units to airborne forces.’
“
’No,
we have never attributed this reduction to combat losses,” the IISS
researcher said, explaining that most of the reallocation occurred
prior to the two-year period that CrowdStrike cites in its report.
“
’The
vast majority of the reduction actually occurs … before
Crimea/Donbass,’ he added, referring to the 2014 Russian invasion
of Ukraine.”
The
definitive “evidence” cited by Alperovitch is now effectively
debunked: indeed, it was debunked by Carr late last year, but that
was ignored in the media’s rush to “prove” the Russians hacked
the DNC in order to further Trump’s presidential ambitions. The
exposure by the Voice of America of Crowdstrike’s falsification of
Ukrainian battlefield losses – the supposedly solid “proof” of
attributing the hack to the GRU – is the final nail in
Crowdstrike’s coffin. They didn’t bother to verify their analysis
of IISS’s data with IISS – they simply took as gospel the
allegations of a pro-Russian blogger. They didn’t contact the
Ukrainian military, either: instead, their confirmation bias dictated
that they shaped the “facts” to fit their predetermined
conclusion.
Now
why do you suppose that is? Why were they married so early – after
a single day – to the conclusion that it was the Russians who were
behind the hacking of the DNC?
Crowdstrike
founder Alperovitch is a Nonresident
Senior Fellow of
the Atlantic Council, and head honcho of its “Cyber Statecraft
Initiative” – of which his role in promoting the “Putin did it”
scenario is a Exhibit A. James Carden, writing in The
Nation,
makes the trenchant point that “The connection between Alperovitch
and the Atlantic Council has gone largely unremarked upon, but it is
relevant given that the Atlantic Council – which is
funded in part by
the US State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and
Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch
Victor Pinchuk – has been among the loudest voices calling for a
new Cold War with Russia.” Adam Johnson, writing on
the FAIR blog, adds to our knowledge by noting that the Council’s
budget is also supplemented by “a consortium of Western
corporations (Qualcomm, Coca-Cola, The Blackstone Group), including
weapons manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman)
and oil companies (ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP).”
Nice
work if you can get it.
This
last little tidbit gives us some insight into what is perhaps the
most curious aspect of the Russian-hackers-campaign-for-Trump story:
the FBI’s complete dependence on
Crowdstrike’s
analysis. Amazingly, the FBI did no independent forensic work on the
DNC servers before Crowdstrike got its hot little hands on them:
indeed, the
DNC denied the FBI access to the servers,
and, as far as anyone knows, the FBI never
examined them.
BuzzFeed quotes an
anonymous “intelligence official” as saying “Crowdstrike is
pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything they have
concluded is not accurate.”
There
is now.
Alperovitch
is scheduled
to testify before
the House Intelligence Committee, and one wonders if our clueless –
and technically challenged – Republican members of Congress will
question him about the debunking of Crowdstrike’s rush to judgment.
I tend to doubt it, since the Russia-did-it meme is now the Accepted
Narrative and no dissent is permitted – to challenge it would make
them “Putin apologists”! (Although maybe Trey Gowdy, the only
GOPer on that panel who seems to have any brains, may surprise me.)
As I’ve been saying for months,
there is no
evidence that
the Russians hacked the DNC: none, zilch, nada.
Yet this false narrative is the entire basis of a campaign launched
by the Democrats, hailed by the Trump-hating media, and fully
endorsed by the FBI and the CIA, the purpose of which is to “prove”
that Trump is “Putin’s puppet,” as Hillary Clinton put
it.
Now the investigative powers of the federal government are being
deployed to confirm that the Trump campaign “colluded” with the
Kremlin in an act the evidence for which is collapsing.
This
whole affair is a vicious fraud. If there is any justice in this
world – and there may not be – the perpetrators should be
charged, tried, and jailed.
=======================
* GRU in Nederland GROe (label veranderd op 5 oktober 2018)
Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het bovenstaande, klik op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht terug kan vinden, dit geldt niet voor de labels: Alperovitch, Crowdstrike, Gowdy, GRU, IISS en Pinchuk.
