Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott J. Shapiro

Author:Scott J. Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

What’s Their Game?

The Russian government denied responsibility. When asked about the attacks in September, Vladimir Putin answered with a smirk and raised eyebrow, “No, I don’t know anything about that. You know how many hackers there are today?” Putin was insinuating that the DNC hacks were a false-flag operation—designed by non-Russian hackers to make it appear as though Russian intelligence was responsible.

Is there any validity in Putin’s accusation? In a sense, yes. As Descartes showed, skepticism is cheap and easy. Descartes began his philosophy by doubting that the world exists. He wondered whether an evil genie was hacking his mind, making him believe that the external world exists when it does not. The modern version of this skepticism is represented by the movie The Matrix. How do we know that we are not brains in a vat being tricked into believing that a computer simulation is the real world so as to keep us docile and producing energy for alien creatures? If that’s possible, then it’s possible that the DNC was hacked by someone other than Russian intelligence.

Cartesian skepticism is a priori, meaning that it is not based on evidence. Descartes had no data to suggest that he was dreaming or that an evil genie was hacking his mind. It was just a bare possibility. Putin’s skepticism is similarly evidence-free. All the technical indicators we have examined in this case—the identical Bitcoin wallets to buy domain names and rent proxy servers, the identical email addresses to rent proxy servers and shorten URLs, the matching C2 IP addresses and security certificates for the German and DNC hacks, the Russian hacker signature in source code, the Russian version of Microsoft Word used to view the documents, the Cyrillic metadata, the Russian error messages—all point to the GRU. None point anywhere else. The sudden appearance of the Romanian Guccifer 2.0 was a laughable cover story.

Consider the nineteen thousand Bitly links found by Secureworks. There are two possibilities: (1) a mysterious group did Fancy Bear’s arduous and sensitive job for a year so that it could later hack the DNC and blame Fancy Bear for it; (2) Fancy Bear did Fancy Bear’s job. If you think that the first possibility is plausible, you have a bright future in academic philosophy.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, one party conspicuously did not make an attribution determination: the US government. For Hillary Clinton, the silence was deafening. All through the summer, she had been trying to turn the hacks to her advantage by claiming that Russia attacked the DNC to help her opponent. In the presidential debates, Clinton would go so far as accusing Donald Trump of being “Putin’s puppet.” President Putin would vastly prefer an accommodating President Trump to an implacable President Clinton. (Trump denied the allegation: “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.”) But Clinton’s argument was hard to make when the U.S. government was unwilling to confirm her accusations. Why wasn’t the director of national intelligence holding a press conference calling out a foreign power for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.