Tag: Accusations | SpinSafe

How a battle over Trump computer accusations is playing out in court

November 18, 2021/in Computer Security

A long-running fight over accusations of computer links between Donald Trump and a Russian bank has intensified recently, shedding new light on how the government uses obscure Internet data to hunt for hackers and underscoring how the legal battles rage on regarding the 2016 presidential race.

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The computer data dispute centers on an allegation that surfaced at the very end of the campaign — that a server tied to the Trump Organization was in repeated contact months earlier with a server for Russia-based Alfa Bank. The claim was based on records from the Domain Name System, or DNS, a kind of digital phone book that matches domain names, usually a jumble of words, to Internet protocol addresses, which are numbers. Such records show when one computer seeks out another, but the logs don’t explain the substance of any communication.

When the claim first surfaced, some computer researchers argued that the DNS data, while not definitive, indicated human communications between the Trump Organization and Russia. Other experts dismissed that idea, saying the nature of the data made it easy to create a fake trail.

The fight over what the Alfa Bank computer data did or didn’t show largely faded from public view. But it roared back to life this fall.

In September, special counsel John Durham indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with ties to Democrats, on charges that he lied to the FBI in 2016 about who his client was when he brought the bureau information about the Alfa Bank computer allegations. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.

Separately, Alfa Bank is suing a number of unknown hackers — “John Does” — who the bank claims fabricated data to “create the false appearance of a covert communication channel between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.” As part of that lawsuit, the bank has sought to subpoena the researchers who initially raised concerns about Alfa’s DNS records.

[Researcher who was primary source of Steele dossier arrested, charged with lying to FBI]

Lawyers for some of those researchers argue Alfa Bank’s suit is an improper effort to use information from Durham’s investigation to help Russian interests better understand…

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Russian spy chief rebuffs “pathetic” SolarWinds hack accusations

May 18, 2021/in Computer Security

The head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has denied any involvement in last year’s SolarWinds cyber attack which saw hackers infiltrate the networks of hundreds of companies as well as nine US governmental agencies.

SVR director Sergei Naryshkin told the BBC that he is “flattered” by the accusations from US and UK authorities that claim Moscow had orchestrated such a sophisticated hack, yet added that he could not “claim the creative achievements of others as his own”.

“These claims are like a bad detective novel,” he told the BBC‘s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg, who asked Naryshkin about the SVR’s links to the hacking group known as APT29, Cozy Bear, or the Dukes, which have been accused of carrying out the cyber attack.

Naryshkin described “all these claims about cyber attacks, poisonings, hacks, interference in elections which are blamed on Russia” as “absurd, and in some cases so pathetic”.

Instead, he suggested that the SolarWinds hack might have been orchestrated by the West, which could have used similar tactics to those exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. He leaked documents detailing the US and UK intelligence services’ efforts to “insert secret vulnerabilities into commercial encryption software” with the help of ISP providers and tech companies.

“I don’t want to assert that this cyber attack was carried out by a US agency but the tactics are similar,” said Naryshkin, who also questioned the evidence obtained by the US and UK intelligence agencies that linked the attack to Moscow.

President Donald Trump previously stated that the SolarWinds hack might have been orchestrated by the Chinese state and accused media outlets of being “petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China”. However, the FBI, CISA, ODNI, and the NSA claimed that the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor behind the incident is “likely Russian in origin”.

The statement prompted Russia’s National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NKTSKI) to issue a warning to Russian businesses, claiming that the new Biden administration could carry out reprisal attacks on critical infrastructure.

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