Computer Scientists Believe a Trump Server Was Communicating With a Russian Bank (slate.com) 548
In light of the Democratic National Committee hack by the Russians earlier this year, a "tightly knit community of computer scientists" working in a variety of fields came up with the hypothesis, "which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump's many servers." In late July, one of the scientists who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves discovered possible malware emanating from Russia, with the destination domain having Trump in its name. What the researcher saw "was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue": Slate Magazine reports: More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server's DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues. The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn't the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation -- conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn't an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. The server was first registered to Trump's business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. That wasn't the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. A small portion of the logs showed communication with a server belonging to Michigan-based Spectrum Health.
I've seen things at least that strange (Score:5, Insightful)
There are all sorts of reasons this sort of behavior might materialize. You know, sort of like there might be all sorts of reasons that Huma Abedin's trove of email - in the hundreds of thousands - might bey on her creepy, estranged husband's laptop. I'm sorry, did I use her name? Woopsie! Hillary Clinton now calls her "a staffer."
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Are there also "all sorts of reasons" that the peak activity of this server would occur only during dates immediately following dramatic election news?
Read the whole story. It wasn't "typo-squatters" it was a Russian bank owned by oligarchs that was connecting to Trump's secret private email server.
It's a well-researched and written story. You might want to check it out unless the news upsets you for some reason.
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They didn't. The article says this, but the attached graph shows otherwise.
Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:5, Informative)
There's spikes all over the graph. Very few correspond with anything election related. The spike during the RNC platform committee is from Michigan (Spectrum Health), not either of the Alfas.
Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the whole story. It wasn't "typo-squatters" it was a Russian bank owned by oligarchs that was connecting to Trump's secret private email server.
Uh, by "secret, private email server", do you mean the server openly and publicly registered to the Trump Organisation?
Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:5, Informative)
Almost... just for giggles, it looks like it isn't even his:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cw... [twimg.com]
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No, as in Emily McMullin from Florida who works at Cendyn, some kind of computer company.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/em... [linkedin.com]
Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:5, Interesting)
What a fucking joke. This is still slashdot, right? There are still people here that understand TCP/IP and DNS, right? I only ask because the author of the slate article makes it abundantly clear that he is unaware of the difference between a server and a domain.
Does that look well researched to anyone here? If you were consulting with a reporter writing a story about servers and DNS, would you let him leave that sentence in the story? Or would you correct him?
More:
What is on 5th Avenue? I'll give you a hint, it isn't the bank, the server or the domain. Someone go stop the presses, I think we just found the mailing address of Trump's office.
Ok, so the server isn't advertising itself with a banner that says "I am a beowolf cluster, and these chumps have be running 5 emails a day." How do these "researchers" know what it is inside? Did they commit some felonies to find out? Do I sense yet another batch of Democrats taking the 5th in the near future?
Assuming they get in through some means, what do they find? Is it a capacious server with huge operating costs, like geothermal liquid cooling? Or is it a 1U stuffed into a rack somewhere and forgotten until someone walks past and notices that the idiot light is lit, 6 months after it shuts itself off because the PSU fan failed? Or is this server just an A record in DNS somewhere, in a domain that exists mostly so that recipient mailservers have a SPF record to look at? They don't tell us any specifics. My guess is that the "well-researched" writer thinks that each domain name needs a big dedicated server, at least to the extent that he is able to recognize them as distinct concepts and objects.
I don't know about you guys, but I check my domain names and purge stale domains about once per decade. The $15 per year to leave them on autopilot autorenewal mode is literally less expensive than my effort to sift through the list plucking out the ones that I no longer need.
Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a well-researched and written story.
What it actually does is cherry-pick the wildest speculation they can come up with, and then (if you bother reading all the way through), points out exactly how eye-rollingly silly it is. A little bit of Occam's Razor applied to the situation, along with some actual experience with provisioned-by-third-party marketing mail servers left to rot for six years is instructive.
Yes, it's well written in the sense that it conforms to Slate's editorial position on trying to get Hillary Clinton elected. It reaches into nothingness in an attempt to construct a narrative desperate to distract from their preferred candidate's flaming case of corruption while actually being a supposed public servant in a position of trust.
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Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:5, Insightful)
From a logical standpoint this really tells us nothing. Just like existing the Abedin "trove" really tells us nothing. It's just a tabula rasa onto which people can project what they already believe.
It wouldn't be surprising for Trump to have some kind of relationship with a Russian bank; that's not necessarily illegal. Now if you were looking for dirt, that'd be a good place to start looking, because there are sanctions against certain Russian firms and individuals. But it doesn't mean you'd find any.
Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:4, Interesting)
Most amazing is the level of astroturfing on here today.
These were the only reasonable posts I saw that weren't AC turfers modded to +5.
Russians, maybe? I hear they pay very well for 'turfers...
Re:I've seen things at least that strange (Score:4, Funny)
Election season is Silly Season (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Election season is Silly Season (Score:5, Insightful)
Geez, politics can make people so stupid.
No, politics makes people PRETEND to be stupid so they can pretend they are outraged by things they are pretending they don't understand well enough, so they can speak their phony outrage out loud in hopes that some other ACTUALLY low-information person will pick up the outrage and run with it all the way to the voting booth. This story is bordering on that. But the credible treatment of it is definitely such.
Re:Election season is Silly Season (Score:5, Insightful)
politics makes people PRETEND to be stupid
Also pretend to have no sense of humor. A Republican could ask why the chicken crossed the road and a Democrat would feign OUTRAGE because jaywalking is ILLEGAL and potential harm to animals IS NO LAUGHING MATTER and vice versa. It's all so tiresome.
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Oh, you mean like the SSH setup I have for all my servers to only listen to known IPs for shell access? Uh, yeah, no kidding.
I think Trump is an idiot and wanted to find something in this story, but this really is scraping the bottom of the speculation barrel.
For all we know it is one of the IT staff with a link to torrent seed hosted overseas. There's a ton of reasons to not like Trump, this is not one of them.
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"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." -R. Feynman
Good quote. This is another good, related one, from Thomas Huxley (great man, agnostic):
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
And this one is good too (from Richard Lindzen):
Science as a tool is sometimes useful; Science as an institution is always problematic.
Re:Election season is Silly Season (Score:5, Informative)
>FTA: "Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence." Oh, you mean like the SSH setup I have for all my servers to only listen to known IPs for shell access? Uh, yeah, no kidding. Geez, politics can make people so stupid.
According to known right-wing rag, the New York Times, the FBI investigated this alleged connection for weeks and decided it was nothing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11... [nytimes.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I heard Trump used Internet Explorer once, too.
Shit, now I can't vote for him.
Re:/., where innuendo is news (Score:4, Funny)
I heard Trump used Internet Explorer once, too.
I could never elect anyone that uses Internet Explorer. Racism, sexism, not paying income tax, demanding the constitution be burnt... all those things I could overlook- but to use Internet Explorer,
Clearly that means he is unfit to be president.
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"We're going to make IE6 great again"
Hack by the Russians? (Score:4, Informative)
Clinton's desperation (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, Slashdot gets visited by Russian IP addresses too! Maybe Slashdot is working with Putin to leak Clinton's E-mails as well?
Seriously, this bullshit coming from Clinton and her minions only shows how desperate they are.
Re:Clinton's desperation (Score:5, Insightful)
However, Slashdot's servers respond to requests from anywhere, not just a particular Russian bank. So it's not the same thing. The evidence is enough to conclude that the Trump organization probably has some kind of relationship with that bank, which is not illegal per se.
This is politics; if you leave yourself open to innuendo, you get shellacked. Trump could easily have avoided this by releasing his tax returns, just like Mitt Romney did.
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And the Democrats wiped the floor with Romney and made him out to be the devil incarnate as well. You cannot placate these people (and they exist in both parties).
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Well, that may be true, but again you can't be surprised if the other side uses the ammunition you give them.
Re:Clinton's desperation (Score:5, Insightful)
What other side? Hasn't Romney endorsed Clinton? The most amazing thing about this election is the validation of the conspiracy theorists who have been saying we have one party rule. It's true, as unbelievable as that is. Bush? Clinton? Hey they're on the same side. Romney? Yep he's there too.
Trump is the only major outsider candidate we've seen since at least Bush (senior) and Clinton, so around 30 years.
The funny thing is how much we criticize places like China for the same kind of crap we have apparently been doing. The media largely functions as propaganda for the establishment. The political parties are basically on the same side. When you read the wikileaks stuff you see the so-called private sector working hand in hand with the government (like google's eric schmidt requesting to be head "outside adviser" to clinton's campaign).. it's like a big joke at this point.
Voting for Clinton at this point is basically a vote to continue our slide into banana republic status.
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What other side? Hasn't Romney endorsed Clinton? The most amazing thing about this election is the validation of the conspiracy theorists who have been saying we have one party rule. It's true, as unbelievable as that is.
Have you ever considered the possibility that Trump is just a completely terrible candidate for President? He is facing a rape trial [theguardian.com] and a fraud trial [bloomberg.com] along with his many other flaws.
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Trump is the only major outsider candidate we've seen since at least Bush (senior) and Clinton, so around 30 years.
You consider Bush Sr to be an outside candidate, but not Obama?
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Which is why Trump hasn't released his tax returns, and why he is running such a crazy campaign: he was going to be vilified anyway, so why play the game at all? Why not be outrageous and loud? As for Romney, he was about as benign a politician we can ever hope to have; what the Democrats did to him was absolutely disgusting.
If journalists or the two party establishments think that after this electio
Re:Clinton's desperation (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, Slashdot gets visited by Russian IP addresses too! Maybe Slashdot is working with Putin to leak Clinton's E-mails as well?
Seriously, this bullshit coming from Clinton and her minions only shows how desperate they are.
FTA:
I also spoke with academics who vouched for Tea Leaves’ integrity and his unusual access to information. “This is someone I know well and is very well-known in the networking community,” said Camp. “When they say something about DNS, you believe them. This person has technical authority and access to data.”)
The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.
[...]
Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.”
The real interesting thing is when people started asking about the server the Trump org took it down, renamed it, and somehow the Russian server knew exactly which hostname to access (suggesting someone from Trump org told them).
Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route.
These aren't political hacks, nor the result of reporters misunderstanding basic concepts. These are qualified experts with reputations to protect who understand hackers, malware, and misconfigured mail servers. They have looked at the evidence and think this is a secret communication channel.
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Yes. I do the same when I travel to Russia, China, or the EU and connect back to the US; those places are full of spies and crooks
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I still have no idea what you are alleging. What kind of horribly nefarious activity is supposed to have happened there? If Trump wanted to have a conversation with Putin, why wouldn't he just call? Or are you alleging that Trump is paying off Putin, or that Putin is paying of Trump, or what?
This is just DNC bullshit to distract from highly embarrassing and damaging E-mails and from Clinton's proven financial connections with Russia and the Uranium One deal.
Clinton has always been a conspiracy theorist, but
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Hey, Slashdot gets visited by Russian IP addresses too!
Hmmm, and the traffic flows across in an encrypted channel, keeping everyone else out. Suspicious.
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Working for? No. Why would they have to? All the banshees and trolls on Twitter or in the media who go to bat for Hillary and cover up her misdeeds don't "work for" her either. Politically biased? Probably, even the Republicans (most of whom hate Trump as well).
In any case, this is utterly irrelevant. It's an attempt to spread FUD and distract from Hillary's actual problems. Hopefully, it will backfire: Hillary is just proving over and over again that she is even more unsuitable for the office of president
Unlikely to be of any use (Score:4, Informative)
While this is certainly interesting and deserves attention (I voted it up in the firehose), it's unlikely to be of any use during the campaign.
For one, the server was registered in 2009 and is unlikely to be anything related to the elections. Trump's business is pretty big, and he has contacts all over the world.
(For comparison, the Podesta group is registered with the U.S. government as a lobbyist for Sberbank [salon.com]. Google "Podesta Russia" for lots of links and info.)
For another, if it's nefarious it's more likely to be some sort of mole or agent within Trump's organization. Again, Trump's business is huge, and there are probably one or more foreign government agents working for him (also in Google, Facebook, and a hundred other big organizations).
Also, there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation. We should wait for the Trump campaign explanation, then see if their explanation seems reasonable. God only knows how many times we've done that for the Clintons!
And finally, it might be too little too late. Word on the street is that Clinton will be stepping down on Tuesday [newsninja2012.com] (tomorrow), Veritas is planning a "blockbuster" drop this week, Wikieaks is about to start phase three [thehill.com] of its election coverage, and internal leaks from the campaign indicate that Hillary is coming apart at the seams: binge drinking [truepundit.com], uncontrolled anger [rickwells.us], and poor judgement in general.
As the saying goes, it's not over until its over.
Let's just wait for the election.
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Veritas is a scam, so the idea that it has anything other than cleverly edited video is ludicrous, even more unbelievable that it has anything to make Clinton worry. Veritas is a sideshow designed more to keep Trump supporters pumped up.
"Word on the street"? Really
Re:Unlikely to be of any use (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unlikely to be of any use (Score:4, Informative)
Why didn't they deny the content of the videos then, and why did Creamer and Foval resign?
Also, people have matched the girl from the video who said she shut down the Arizona freeway to pictures from the scene, and found her payment records with Hillary's campaign. Everything checks out about the Veritas story so far.
Also, can you give me a plausible explanation for how "clever editing" makes innocent conversation sound exactly like someone explicitly stating they hire the mentally ill to start fights at their opponents' political events?
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How much money do you want to put on your sources and where can I meet up with you to make the bet and put our money in the hands of a neutral party? If you're willing to bet enough on these sources I will fly to wherever you are to make counter bets on your claims.
I hate to be rude but I feel that I have to, how can you be so naive as to believe Clinton will drop out less than two weeks before the election when she is clearly ahead in the polls? You're straight up posting celebrity gossip level nonsense he
The one Podesta is a registered lobbyist for? (Score:2)
Is it Sberbank, Russia’s biggest financial institution, and the one that The Podesta Group is a registered lobbyist for [battleswarmblog.com]?
You know, the "Hillary Clinton inner circle" Podestas? Of Wikileaks fame [battleswarmblog.com]?
Oh, it seems to be a different bank.
Who cares at this point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Trump is corrupt as fuck, but he hasn't been investigated for 30 years. Not to mention Trump is a 100% asshole who shouldn't even be a choice. Dafuq R-tarded, you can't beat this asshole in a primary? Methinks you need to rethink some fundamental principals. Hint: Neither Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio are your white knights on white horses running in to save the day.
I finally voted today, went for Johnson. Yeah, he's a pothead who doesn't know what Aleppo is. But IMHO he's our best chance of not impeaching a president in the next 4 years.
This Shouldn't be Surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
This shouldn't be surprising. The only foreign country Trump praises is Russia, every traditional US ally he alienates in one form or another while Russia has shown itself directly antagonistic to Western interests and yet he still heaps praise on them. The only foreign political leader Trump ever praises is Putin. Members of his campaign staff have ties to Putin. Now we have the possibility of sketchy communications between Russia and Trump's campaign.
I loath conspiracy theories but if there was ever the c
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The only foreign political leader Trump ever praises is Putin.
Oh ho ho! If only Trump's admiration for oppressive leaders and regimes [nbcnews.com] were limited to Putin.
NYTimes has released their report on this (Score:2)
The NY Times investigation referred to in the Slate article has now been released. I'm guessing Slate pushed them out a bit quicker than they'd hoped.
Lots of interesting things in the article, but they feel there's insufficient evidence to claim a link between the Trump server and Alfa.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html [nytimes.com]
Don't fret (Score:3)
I'm sure everyone will give Trump the same benefit of the doubt that they give Hillary.
Dan Farmer and Defcon (Score:3)
Do any of you guys remember one of the original Defcon's, where Dan Farmer (I think?) was talking about hiding payloads in the white space of DNS packets?
This quote from the article made me think about that.
"Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work.
---->After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. ---------
This has been debunked (Score:5, Informative)
If you want an insight into Trump's ties with Russia, look at Paul Manaforte and read Time magazines article on the subject http://time.com/4433880/donald... [time.com]
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Hardly. The libs are expecting a massive, ground-shifting victory. It's just that Trump is always good copy. Even people who hate him love to read about him, and pass stuff along.
It's like I said to my sister the other day; I can't wait for November 9 so I can stop obsessing about Trump and start obsessing about the new Harry Potter movie.
Re:BULL SH!T (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like I said to my sister the other day; I can't wait for November 9 so I can stop obsessing about Trump and start obsessing about the new Harry Potter movie.
Problem is Trump won't go away post-election. If he wins it will be worse than this, and if he loses he starts Trump media and doubles down on the loose talk and continual lies.
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Problem is Trump won't go away post-election. If he wins it will be worse than this, and if he loses he starts Trump media and doubles down on the loose talk and continual lies.
Of course Trump won't go away, just like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi won't go away even if we take away all of ISIS's territory unless we kill him (al-Baghdadi, I mean). But he'll become a lot less important.
What fuels the fire of interest in Trump, even among people who aren't particularly interested in reality TV, is the possibility he might become president. Take that off the table, and becomes a lot less interesting except to a small core of true believers. I guess a lot depends on how decisively he loses.
Re:BULL SH!T (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been part of their modus operandi from day one. Whenever they're caught lying or committing crimes, they try to deflect the blame to someone else or change the topic into an attack on Trump or their accusers. The Russia boogeyman is a favorite for them.
It's so tired by now, and they've been caught lying so many times (pretty much every time they open their mouths, they're lying) that nobody believes a thing they say. The DNC could say the sun rose this morning and I'd still check out my window to verify.
Re:BULL SH!T (Score:5, Insightful)
The evidence we're given is this:
"What the researcher saw "was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue": "
A ping is an ICMP echo request [networksorcery.com]. They can have data, but it's the same both ways and it's generally nothing meaningful. I get random pings and crap from everywhere, including Russia, China, etc. along with port scans and everything else. Frankly this is utter BS without more evidence than a random server responding to some pings and not others.
It's also not clear how they were able to spy on this traffic without working at an ISP (where spying on your customers is generally frowned upon). But if they were in the middle of this, they could simply have inserted their own pings by spoofing the source address of some traffic. The article was a sad waste of time. There are lots of allegations that are based on nothing at all.
Re:BULL SH!T (Score:5, Funny)
A ping is an ICMP echo request [networksorcery.com].
Thanks for the 411 Rain Man. :-)
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Looks to be pretty bogus [twimg.com].... it would appear that the damn thing doesn't even belong to Trump.
Re: BULL SH!T (Score:5, Informative)
Without having read TFA, often even as a network engineer, I'll use the term "ping" even when not referring to ICMP. For example, I'll refer to an SNMP walk (of any kind) as a "ping".
Still though, this doesn't come off as suspicious to me at all. Since when is it odd or otherwise unusual that a server belonging to a billionaire talks to a server belonging to a bank in a foreign country? That's like saying that it's odd that there's dog piss on a fire hydrant.
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There's also some stuff about DNS queries, but when they actually talk to the bank, someone was spamming something about a Trump property. So the easiest explanation here is a corporate firewall that rejects their pings and scans and a few people on the inside clicking spam.
So I will take part of that back, I don't like spammers and Trump should fire whatever marketing group was doing that to promote his place.
Re: BULL SH!T (Score:5, Interesting)
Without having read TFA, often even as a network engineer, I'll use the term "ping" even when not referring to ICMP. For example, I'll refer to an SNMP walk (of any kind) as a "ping".
Exactly. The term 'ping' may appear unfortunate to those of us who know what the ICMP protocol actually is, but it'll be suitably edgy to a tech-ignorant audience who need to feel that the writer actually knows what he's talking about.
Still though, this doesn't come off as suspicious to me at all. Since when is it odd or otherwise unusual that a server belonging to a billionaire talks to a server belonging to a bank in a foreign country?
When the bank is one of only a very few addresses the server communicates with.
Look, it's circumstantial at best, no more of a smoking gun than any number of other things. But if I were a US-based journalist, I'd consider it worth digging into. I don't know that I'd publish something based on the logs alone, but I would certainly be willing to follow wherever they lead. Even if the conclusion is that Trump has investments in Russian companies, that's a notable fact, given his constant and explicit denial that he has any financial ties to Russia.
That's like saying that it's odd that there's dog piss on a fire hydrant.
Kind of. It's more like saying it's odd that this dog doesn't seem to want to piss anywhere except at this particular fire hydrant, which he insists he would never piss on if you gave him a thousand years and a fire hose.
So yeah, the circumstances are curious, but there's nothing here that would make me jump out of my chair and shout, 'Aha!!!' And trust me, I'd be the first to do that if it took Trump down a notch.
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...trust me, I'd be the first to do that if it took Trump down a notch.
There you go again, being reasonable. If you want to match the Trump crowd, you have to assume by default that everything he does is suspicious, at the very least, and probably has malicious intent. He went to the loo? Highly suspicious - probably wanted to hide his substance abuse. He passed a primary school in his car? Probably prospecting for under-age girls. Finding there is a Russian bank that communicates with one of his servers is practically watertight proof that he is in with Putin in a major way.
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Well I read TFA and it is suspicious. When the info came "out", the server was shut down AND a new server suddenly appeared and only one entity knew the name to look it up by, Alfa bank. It sounds like somehow the TeaLeaves guy has access to the DNS server logs (root servers) and so he/she is not looking at ISP data but the lookups. Since only one entity knew the name to lookup, it smells pretty bad for Trump. The article is long and detailed so I don't expect almost anyone to actually read it. The best way
Re: BULL SH!T (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no real evidence of Hillary's lies,
You don't think Congressional testimony counts as evidence?
Re:I trust Russia MORE than I trust the DNC (Score:4, Insightful)
I trust Russia MORE than I trust the DNC. If Trump is in good with them, then good for him.
To hell with Hillary and her cronies.
Pure, unadulterated idiocy. ^^^^^
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You're either a Russian or an idiot.
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Yeah... a real estate developer and entrepenuer is a communist.
That's as stupid as painting Putin as a communist.
I wonder if you were still alive when the Russians were still communist.
Who's next? Bill Gates? Warren Buffet?
Billionaire blacklist?
Re: No smoking gun then? (Score:2)
Are you as knowledgeable about the Clinton foundation dealings with Russia? Or are you just very selective in your outrage?
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Aleppo is someone else's civil war. You seem to want to cry crocodile tears over it. Are you willing to shed your own blood over it?
Ukraine was a dick move but it was still largely a regional thing.
So far, the biggest threat to western security seems to be from the idiot that wants to impose a no fly zone where the Russians are already entrenched and have SAMs.
Those horses are out of the barn already. That pooch has already been screwed.
Re: Temper your enthusiasm (Score:5, Insightful)
You guys nominated someone under criminal investigation by the FBI. The only people on earth who can't talk about how shitty Trump is are Clinton supporters.
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Federal Judge Allows Suit Against Trump University to Proceed
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/us/politics/trump-university-case.html [nytimes.com]
Reminder: Donald Trump due in court after Election Day on child rape and racketeering charges
https://www.rawstory.com/2016/10/reminder-donald-trump-due-in-court-after-election-day-on-child-rape-and-racketeering-charges/ [rawstory.com]
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Do you see anyone on the ticket that isn't a scoundrel? Has there been any presidential candidate in decades who wasnt a scoundrel?
What some want in a candidate comes along maybe once or twice in a nation's history, and if that was what someone was looking for, they sure wouldn't find it in a real estate huckster, and let's not even get started on the third party candidates.
Re: Temper your enthusiasm (Score:5, Insightful)
Has there been any presidential candidate in decades who wasnt a scoundrel?
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but yes: Barack Hussein Obama.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, love him or hate him he was a nice break from sex scandals.
The DNC were morons for letting Clinton anywhere near the nomination. It's like they and she thinks she's entitled. Forget about all of the people that haven't stopped hating her since she was first lady.
She's going to bring people together? You have to be a partisan dope to believe that.
Whatever happens election day, I won't stop ridiculing whoever wins. =P
Ar you people insane? Why is this in any way same? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to be totally insane to think Russians possibly having malware in some bank that tried to protect itself to begin with, is anything even CLOSE to the seriousness of the Secretary of State ignoring multiple warnings about how insecure a personal email server was when inevitably she'd be sending top secret material over email...
Hillary brought all of her ills on herself and the blowback from it is not yet a hundredth of what it should be. Every single person who knows anything about computer security should be utterly ashamed at ever supporting her actions, and the fact that so many still support her makes me think there is no real hope ever for comprehensive computer security. The system is rotten to the core, many computer "professionals" willing to compromise a systems integrity at the drop of a hat.
Meh, apples/oranges (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell, that was one of the most badass things to come out of this. Hilary was asked if it was Colin's idea to run the server and she said no, it was her responsibility. A few weeks later Wikileaks dumped emails showing it _was_ Powell suggesting it. I've yet to see HRC get an ounce of credit for sh
Re:possibily illegal (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, it's worse than that, looks like they were sniffing traffic at either the ISP of one of the two endpoints or a backbone.
If there were something here, you'd expect them to talk about finding data in the ICMP echo requests. You'd expect them to communicate over something normal like SSH. You'd expect some evidence that there was something illegal or improper going on here (other than, y'know, spying on other people's network traffic....).
Their audience is apparently morons who don't know what a ping is.
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the story at slate that i read says nothing about icmp, it talks exclusively about DNS lookups, incuding after the trump server admin team changed the authoratative host name of the server in question.
unless somebody in Russia is clairvoyant, or the thousands of recorded transactions were somehow faked, it means somebody in the trump server admin team contacted Alfa bank's admin team, and gave them the new resolution host data. It was not up long enough for normal record proliferaton to be accounable for a
Re:possibily illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right that they talk about DNS queries, but I'm pretty sure this is an actual ICMP echo:
It can also be pretty easily explained by having a bunch of normal people on PCs behind a corporate firewall that doesn't accept traffic. Which makes sense because when they talk to the people, we find this:
So, I'm still saying this looks like BS to me. Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible that some Russian hacked something somewhere. I just don't buy there being a story here without more evidence than a few stray DNS queries.
Re: possibily illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
The hacks have exposed a ton of crap. Possible evidence of us selling weapons to Isis in Libya (RIP Vile Rat) and trying to claw them back, they faked violence at the Trump rallies (and blamed Bernie), they were talking about making hay of Trump's "bromance" with Putin long ago, they utterly shafted Bernie in every way. He even had people give him fake support just to steal his voters back at the end. They faked a Craigslist ad for Trump that was disgustingly sexist. Nobody there trusts each other. Carlos Danger (Anthony Wiener's) ways were known long ago, he appears to have gotten leaked classified info from his wife, top Clinton aide Huma, enough so that Huma sent emails from Hillary's device and vice versa, also forwarding classified things to webmail (Yahoo, Gmail). They talk about being especially worried about the sensitive pic of North Korea that was in her emails. They talk about quid pro quo to declassify one of the items she sent retroactively. In 2010, they talk about "how we just changed an entire Governor's race in 48 hours--without any fingerprints." They discuss an email from "Diane Reynolds" (Chelsea Clinton) about how the apple doesn't fall from the tree: you get a kiss on the cheek, then stabbed in the front and in the back. Hillary, if you're wondering, goes by "Evergreen" and "hrod" among other things. I haven't even covered the half of things, either. Oh, and FYI, some of that is from the FBI's response to FOIA requests, the rest is from the Podesta email dumps, which as we all should know, can be cryptographically validated via the DKIM signatures.
But yeah, let's worry about whether maybe Russia informed us of this. You know what Russia's stake in the election is?
Russia doesn't want to go to war with us over Syria.
Do you?
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Based on Russia's behavior in the last years, your assumption that they do not want a war is not apparent from their actions.
In 2014 alone, 38 airspace violations (Finland, Estonia, Denmark, ...) from Russian military planes... including close encounters with passenger planes and US planes or boats.
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I am not sure they want an actual arm race, because I am sure they haven't forgotten how Reagan brought them down economically with that in the 80'ies.
What I am sure that they do want is that NATO and friends will back off and not do anything, as we have done in so many places, Ukraine and Syria to name a few famous ones.
Every time Putin rattles the nuclear saber Western and NATO countries rattle their knees, so Putin has no reason to have _any_ respect for whatever we _say_.
A full scale war is not even nec
You can get 1 BTC if you can forge a message (Score:3)
It's amazing that you think that someone, since at least 2009, has been sending fake messages with fake senders from Gmail, Yahoo and clintonemail.com without anyone wondering about the oddly incriminating messages showing up in their inboxes.
If you think you can fake these, you can get 1 bitcoin from erratasec [erratasec.com].
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BTW, I will say that you may be right inasmuch as your arguing that nobody here MITM'd them.
Re:possibily illegal (Score:5, Informative)
Their audience is apparently morons who don't know what a ping is.
Well, as an actual software developer who has worked with network protocols I can assure you that there are lots of different types of ping, TCP ping, etc.
Furthermore, those in doubt can just check the RFC for ICMP and discover that it includes echo packets with an arbitrary payload. That should get a person one dim lightbulb away from realizing that you can tunnel other things on top of ICMP, and then from there they might do a search of the interwebs and discover that is old hat.
The pedants in this article are mostly a bunch of tools who don't know an ICMP echo packet from a Russian in a fur hat! Worse, they don't know a Russian ICMP packet in a squirrel toupee from a Brazilian SSH attack!
So even though they're possibly not even talking about ICMP, if they were it would all make sense. But DNS is also used for tunnels, so that's probably what it really is. Also, DNS is more likely to make it into logs that people have legit access to and aren't private.
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Re:No one is flipping to the Russians...sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)
A rich white New Yorker is the oligarchy.
Re:No one is flipping to the Russians...sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)
> A rich white New Yorker is the oligarchy.
You mean the senator from New York?
Re:No one is flipping to the Russians...sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)
We know he's the last chance for a long, long time, if ever, to fuck with the oligarchs.
It's not. These kinds of opportunities are bubbling up more and more often, though mainly at the state level. If Trump fails because of his foolishness, another will come along.
Note that it's a constant struggle.......new guys come up, break the establishment, then settle in to become the new establishment. Andrew Jackson was an establishment breaker. Abraham Lincoln was one too, although by the time he became president, the establishment was more-or-less shattered. William Jennings Bryan tried but failed on his heavy cross of gold (reminds you of this comic [xkcd.com]). Roosevelt2 might have been considered an establishment breaker, although again it was rather broken by his time as well. Roosevelt1 probably was the establishment. Truman deserves a special mention for trying to reform the establishment from within, and to some degree he was successful.
Um... you do know he's part of the oligarchy (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It really is silly season. The bottom line is that Trump is the "fuck you, oligarchy" candidate. We know he's the last chance for a long, long time, if ever, to fuck with the oligarchs
So...you argument for picking an openly idiotic, racist, lecherous, bigoted, misogynist is to say "fuck you" to the oligarchy? And what the hell makes you think he isn't part of the oligarchy? He has a history of treating anyone who isn't rich and white like shit, treating women even worse, and basically is a walking embodiment of everything America should have left behind at least 50 years ago. It's like watching Archie Bunker run for president, only with less class.
That is why he is being supported.
He's being supported because the so-call
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> Let me tell you something. You take a look at Mosul.
You did notice how all of the high value targets in Mosul were able to flee? There was no apparent attempt to capture these people on the run or hit them on the road or otherwise get them.
Meanwhile we've got a nasty bit of urban warfare that hasn't even started yet and they're talking about a flood of refugees that are going to overwhelm what little resources they have set aside for that sort of thing.
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> Let me tell you something. You take a look at Mosul.
You did notice how all of the high value targets in Mosul were able to flee? There was no apparent attempt to capture these people on the run or hit them on the road or otherwise get them.
Meanwhile we've got a nasty bit of urban warfare that hasn't even started yet and they're talking about a flood of refugees that are going to overwhelm what little resources they have set aside for that sort of thing.
That's exactly what the strategy is trying to do, get the non-combatants out of the way before taking the city, it makes it a lot easier to conduct warfare. From this article [nytimes.com]:
Re:What do you call a russian Manchurian candidate (Score:4, Insightful)
Citation please on the modifying. Wikileaks is one of the few true old-style journalist organizations.
If anything, Clinton is big business' Manchurian Candidate. At best Trump will be "George W. Bush II", I don't see him completing much of anything which may be a good thing for a change. The wall won't be built even if he wanted to WJC and GWB already tried it, at best it will create some jobs in a small Texas town and that will be the height of it's success. ObamaCare will collapse with or without him. Hillary will be investigated and exonerated regardless (since an investigation requires Congress, not a President) and I'm not sure what the rest of his platform is, if he even has any.
The Middle East will continue being a mess, with a little bit of luck, he's incompetent enough after all, Russia will continue to expand their control in the region with as much success and damage to their own image as the repeated US invasions in the region caused. The Korea's will continue to be at war and 'the bomb' and any of their efforts will continue to be a 'success' in NK media alone.
Re:What do you call a russian Manchurian candidate (Score:4, Insightful)
No that's the point she spinned it into. If that had been her point, and if her actions backed it up, it would be totally fine. But her actions show that her public vs private opinions are not just "slightly different messages tweaked for each group" but outright contradictions and falsehoods. You can't tell people publicly that one of your positions is to "uphold the rule of law, protect our borders and national security" (that's on her website) while telling people in speeches "My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders." That's not nuance. That's not targeting. That means she's blatantly lying to one group or the other.
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How the fuck did these guys get between the Trump server and the DNS server making the queries? (Yes, I RTFA.)
Then you should know, because the article tells you: "Some of the most trusted DNS specialists--an elite group of malware hunters, who work for private contractors--have access to nearly comprehensive logs of communication between servers. They work in close concert with internet service providers, the networks through which most of us connect to the internet, and the ones that are most vulnerable to massive attacks. To extend the traffic metaphor, these scientists have cameras posted on the internetâ(
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Well we know you're not on Trump's, because his campaign doesn't have enough money.
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The story also says that they couldn't ping the server but a particular server in Russia and a few elsewhere in the US could. ICMP traffic isn't broadcasted nor 'passively monitored'.
DNS is cached aggressively at most if not all gateway routers, sure you can aggregate some (anonymous) data about DNS requests but this talks about an internal machine frequently requesting a particular DNS address with specific time periods. At best, you can say a particular NETWORK requested a DNS address a few times per day
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