It is awfully high risk and awfully low reward for Russia to hack the DNC right before the 2016 election. The Democrats are likely to win, and they'll come into office with a fresh memory of Russia having screwed with them.
On the other hand: if they did hack the DNC, but screwed up by getting caught, maybe it makes sense to recast the operation as some sort of Wikileaks-esque information liberation strike?
Or, some faction either inside or outside of Russia is actively trying to mess with some other faction inside of Russia by implicating them in such a cartoonish plot.
The thing I don't see being taken very seriously among security people is the idea that there is a random hacker somewhere in eastern Europe who pulled this off on their own. Not because it would be hard to do, but because the specific traces that apparently got left don't make sense for a freelancer.
> It is awfully high risk and awfully low reward for Russia to hack the DNC right before the 2016 election. The Democrats are likely to win, and they'll come into office with a fresh memory of Russia having screwed with them.
The Russian government is jonesing rather openly for a Trump win, so even if it is a bad decision on their part it seems quite likely they went ahead and did it anyway. If Clinton does win it certainly wouldn't be the first time that Putin's eagerness to square up to the US has left him in a situation where he generated American antagonism for no particular benefit to Russia. I get the impression that the Russian government enjoys its own infowars escapades a bit more than is healthy for it, and likely overrates their effectiveness a bit.
Besides, I'm not sure it really is a clearly bad decision (from a Machiavellian perspective, of course). Relations between Russia and the Clintons, the US foreign-policy set etc. seem to have already got so bad that it's not clear that even a fairly big provocation like this is likely to cause US actions to be that much more hostile than they would be anyway. For example, if Clinton gets in it seems there's a near-certainty of a big and imminent intensification of US/Russian proxy conflict, especially in Syria. Conversely if Trump does win the likely changes in US foreign policy promise to be a major and enduring victory for putinismo: it's a rare opportunity, and Trump's odds of winning aren't (yet, at least) a hopeless long-shot.
The "Democrats hacked themselves" is not a very good theory. I can't fathom what they would have to gain from it and, regardless, I'm certain the Clinton campaign does not want to remind people how easy it is to hack private servers.
The theory[1] is that the DNC wants to release all the bad stuff they have on Trump but don't want to do it themselves[2]. Reminding people about how many corps have been hacked actually doesn't hurt Clinton's e-mail argument that much[3] and it gets a whole lot of juicy stuff out against a candidate that isn't really an expert at political maneuvers. When protestors can beat up your supporters, and its your fault, you really don't know what you are doing[4]. Throwing a little more hate in the media works.
1) which I am explaining, not advocating
2) It actually follows a The West Wing episode (without the hacking, just using the mail, same process - different parts)
3) polling shows people who believe she did something wrong weren't going to vote for her anyway
Zero is the number of security people I know, including many who sincerely loathe HRC, who believe the DNC staged this. CrowdStrike's CEO (an acquaintance) is... uh... not exactly a Democratic partisan.
I wasn't talking about security people (I would assume they would have actual information). I was just explaining the reason some believe it was an inside job. Its not entirely off the wall given some of the other, damn near psychotic things that have happened during political campaigns.
Sorry, yeah, I'm not trying to rebut you, just adding the color that:
* People who follow this stuff uniformly don't believe the DNC staged it.
* If you were crazy enough to stage a hack of the DNC, George Kurtz's company is probably not the one you'd pick to collaborate with.
(Also: we're on opposite ends of the political spectrum, me and GK, but I would bet all the money I have against a claim that he'd done something shady here. CrowdStrike might be wrong about the Russian attribution, but they aren't making it all up.)
[edit: didn't figure you were going for the rebut, but I reread mine and thought I needed to really clarify]
On a side question, I know a lot of groups that have side
channels where they discuss "inside baseball" type stuff away from non-insiders. Do security experts have a "hey did you hear about ...?" network or is it more of an I have other friends in the business type thing?
I’m having a hard time following this. The game theory of… Russians?… hacking the DNC for what purpose? How would a Clinton win affect this?
> In an earlier statement, Trump said the hack was a political ploy concocted by the Democrats. (Bloomberg)
Or maybe you’re referring to that?