I have posted this before but in the light of the Russia hacking our election NSA .....

[Botany]

..... it needs to be seen again.

USA Today Russians suspected of hacking Wisconsin Dems

GREEN BAY — County websites of the Democratic Party in the area have been under attack, at least one apparently by Russian hackers, an officer of the party said.

What appears to have been Russian hackers compromised the website of the 8th Congressional District Democratic Party as well as the sites of seven county Democratic party organizations, said Mary Ginnebaugh, who chairs the congressional district as well as the Brown County Democratic parties.

Russian hackers have been accused on the national level with interfering with the U.S. presidential election by getting into the Democratic National Committee’s website as well as that of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington.

While no one can prove beyond doubt that Russians also were involved in the local hack job, two hackers left “calling cards” with Russian email addresses on the local websites in an apparent gesture of contempt or braggadocio, Ginnebaugh said. Green Bay police were notified and have forwarded information to the FBI, she said.


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/24/russians-suspected-hacking-wisconsin-dems/97023222/

[Igel]

1. Yeah, calling cards.

Or misdirection, done to tweak the noses of local (D) parties and feed more of the anti-Russian paranoia that's going on. Did Russian groups, often under the aegis of the GRU or FSB, try to do some seriously bad things? Yeah. Were their attempts successful? In a lot of instances. But it's still more likely that their real effect was feeding the general American smear-frenzy and hunger for scandal-mongering, and that's mostly on us. So of course we want a smoking gun showing that they hacked actual voting equipment and altered vote results--it means that we Democrats really won by any measure, and that feels good; it also means that we Americans didn't shoot ourselves in the foot, and admitting that feels bad. And if they did it in a way that didn't entail intense stupidity, like clicking on a link that says "Win a phree Ifone!" but with the URL "all-ur-data-r-putins.ru", so much the better.


I really dislike going to a page just to find it's been hacked. Sort of pointless, that sort of thing: It's not clear what the hacker gets unless there's some malware download built in, even if the hacker is just elsewhere in the US. Internationally, you'd have to wonder. Esp. if the website server isn't where any databases are kept.