Group allegedly behind DNC hack targeted Ukraine, report finds

[Douglas Kawasaki]

Source: The Guardian

A new report suggests the same hacking group believed to have hacked the Democrats during the recent presidential election also targeted Ukrainian artillery units over a two-year period, that if confirmed would add to suspicions that they are Russian state operatives.

The report, issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, said a malware implant on Android devices was used to track the movements of Ukrainian artillery units and then target them. The hackers were able to access communications and geolocations of the devices, which meant the artillery could then be fired on and destroyed.

The report will further fuel concerns that Russia is deploying hacking and cyber-attacks as a tool of both war and foreign policy. The hack “extends Russian cyber-capabilities to the frontlines of the battlefield”, the report said.

Russia gave military and logistical backing to separatists fighting against Ukrainian forces in east Ukraine, in a war that broke out in spring 2014.


Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/dnc-hack-crowdstrike-ukraine-malware-russia

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But....But...Trump said the hacker is some random guy from New Jersey!

[Igel]

1. Some kinds of hacking are puerile and facile.

Where I work--not top secret, no great protector of national interests--we're routinely phished. We try to avoid it, but since there are a few hundred employees every week a few of us get our computers hacked. Click on the wrong link in spam that looks authentic, and you're toast.

We're not targeted. Our emails wound up in a database of emails that the hackers use. My personal email account's routinely the subject of attempted phishing, mostly because I've used the same email address since 1999. Can't imagine how many hacker databases it's found its way into.

The hackers of my personal appear to be mostly Chinese. Why? Who knows. No idea who's behind the phishing at work. A lot of the phishing is opportunistic. If they got my work emails, they'd yawn. But who knows what email addresses they'd get and who they could spam? The claim that the Russian hackers (who weren't military or FSB, but each of which routinely cooperates, the story goes, with either the military or the FSB) targeted the DNC requires more proof than I've seen--it entails that they specifically did not send those emails to non-DNC people.

The Android hack was more specific, apparently.