Reconstructing a Hack
November 2, 2018
Investigations into the 2016 US elections are still going to occur long after President Donald Trump is out of office. The question non-tech savvy people are asking, however, is how did the Russian hackers hack the election? OS News takes a look at the answer in, “How they Did It: GRU Hackers vs. US Elections.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller assembled a grand jury to investigate the hacking and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced an indictment against twelve of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff aka GRU. GRU is short for “Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye.” The twelve GRU members are charged with “active cyber operations with the intent of interfering in the 2016 presidential election.”
How was the indictment made?
“The allegations are backed up by data collected from service provider logs, Bitcoin transaction tracing, and additional forensics. The DOJ also relied on information collected by US (and likely foreign) intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Reading between the lines, the indictment reveals that the Mueller team and other US investigators likely gained access to things like Twitter direct messages and hosting company business records and logs, and they obtained or directly monitored email messages associated with the GRU (and possibly WikiLeaks). It also appears that the investigation ultimately had some level of access to internal activities of two GRU offices.”
Trump expressed doubt that Russia was involved in hacking the elections after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit meeting. The US director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, however, concluded that Russia was involved. Trump is trusting Putin over his own people. Trump is also victim bashing and blaming the DNC and DCC for not being prepared for this sort of attack and ignoring advice from third parties who said this could happen.
More hacking? Probably.
Whitney Grace, November 2, 2018
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