Russian Hacking

A Technologists Deep Dive into indictment detailing Russia's Hacking of the 2016 USA elections Since the 2016 USA elections evidence is piling up that Russia's Intelligence services attacked the election process with an attempt to derail Hillary Clinton's candidacy. Evidence is piling up in other countries about similar cybersecurity attacks by Russia against other elections. On Friday, the special prosecutors office investigating the USA election hacking (Robert Meuller's team) released an indictment laying out the Russian Intelligence service officers involved, and more importantly the technology and techniques being used. In part this story is about misapplying technology in order to create more chaos and confusion in the world.

Guccifer 2.0 and fake Romania connections to Russia hacking 2016 USA elections Last Friday (July 13, 2018), the Meuller team issued an indictment of a handfull of Russian GRU agents who are claimed to have hacked the DNC and DCCC servers, then distributed stolen information in an attempt to discredit the Hillary Clinton campaign. Or maybe the goal was to have Donald Trump elected President, which did happen. In any case a big figure in the story is Guccifer 2.0, who purported to be a Romanian hacker, but the Meuller team claims was actually Russian agents. This seems like an interesting angle to explore a bit.

How did Kaspersky Labs go from top-rung anti-virus software maker, to being labeled as working for Russian Intelligence?

Kaspersky Labs has long been a well respected very popular anti-virus software vendor. One clear piece of evidence is that Kaspersky's software was sold through Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples and other high-ranking outlets. This year the evidence has mounted that Kaspersky may have been collaborating with Russian Intelligence, their software has been yanked from those three stores, the US Government has a blanket ban on using Kaspersky's software, and so forth.

A few days ago I posted a summary of the technical aspects to anti-virus software could be used to steal anything out of any computer running the software.

Russian Intelligence Services may have hijacked Kaspersky Labs to steal hacking tools from the NSA

Supposedly Kaspersky Labs used its anti-virus software to steal stuff from customers computers, and this included a treasure trove of NSA hacking tools. The Intercept has written a very deep dive into the technical issues, demonstrating that perhaps Russian Intelligence services instead hijacked Kaspersky's software. Regardless, the discussion shows some disturbing things about how anti-virus software works, and demonstrates that anti-virus software companies have the ability to steal anything from any computer running their software. This makes me even more glad I don't run Windows.

A few months ago the USA Government banned the use of Kaspersky anti-virus software, Best Buy yanked it from their stores and from the computers it sells, etc. Reportedly Kaspersky Labs siphoned a bunch of hacking tools from an NSA employee computer. This involved Kaspersky Labs programming their software to search for specific terms, top-secret NSA programs and the like, and then targeting computers belonging to specific people at the NSA, in order to steal the tools. And -- regardless of whether Kaspersky did it, or whether Russian Intelligence hijacked Kaspersky, that sentence should have sent a chill up your spine. Every anti-virus software maker has the ability to search any computer, and upload any file on any computer. That capability is baked into anti-virus software for legitimate reasons, but could be misused.