Suspected Russian hackers spied on US federal agencies

[Cyberfx1024 7,980]

You guys don't even want me to get started on a InfoSec level. This is a major major major hack across the board and one that could probably have been prevented. There is supposedly over a $700 Billion dollar NDAA again this year but we are facing budget cuts, so I really think we have some base somewhere on another world. 

[laylalex 7,300]

4 hours ago, Dashinka said:

Is internal polling data considered Top Secret information?

Does something need to be Top Secret in order for it to be compromising? I'm just sort of asking that in general here. I mean, there is a good (I think) question: why would someone who is working with Russian intelligence at the same time he was working with Manafort (this is in at least one of the cases that came out of the Mueller investigation) receive internal domestic voting data while Manafort is working for the Trump campaign? What is the simple explanation for that? I don't have a simple one or a complicated one. I have nothing.

[Ban Hammer 13,484]

7 minutes ago, laylalex said:

Does something need to be Top Secret in order for it to be compromising?

no

[Dashinka 24,732]

1 hour ago, laylalex said:

Does something need to be Top Secret in order for it to be compromising? I'm just sort of asking that in general here. I mean, there is a good (I think) question: why would someone who is working with Russian intelligence at the same time he was working with Manafort (this is in at least one of the cases that came out of the Mueller investigation) receive internal domestic voting data while Manafort is working for the Trump campaign? What is the simple explanation for that? I don't have a simple one or a complicated one. I have nothing.

And like I said, Manafort is paying for his crime, and yet Swalwell who was presumably having a romantic relation with a Chinese spy is still sitting on the Intel Committee.  What is wrong with that picture?

[laylalex 7,300]

Just now, Dashinka said:

And like I said, Manafort is paying for his crime, and yet Swalwell who was presumably having a romantic relation with a Chinese spy is still sitting on the Intel Committee.  What is wrong with that picture?

Can we not focus on one thing? It's like a chronic case of whataboutism here sometimes.  

 

Manafort isn't paying for the crime of passing internal polling data to Kilimnik though. For all we know, the information -- private information, of course -- was shared with permission, and that wouldn't be a crime at all. The data isn't top secret after all, it's just got some political value. All I was saying was we don't know the why of the sharing. What legitimate use would domestic polling data be to parties outside the US, beyond as, say, for academic research? Why would anyone outside the US care about what the data in Wisconsin were saying? Just a lot of unanswered questions that have zero to do with Swalwell.

 

Reality has no meaning anymore, and I suppose the faster I accept that the happier I'll be. That or reup my Klonopin prescription. 💊

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

4 hours ago, Cyberfx1024 said:

You guys don't even want me to get started on a InfoSec level. This is a major major major hack across the board and one that could probably have been prevented. There is supposedly over a $700 Billion dollar NDAA again this year but we are facing budget cuts, so I really think we have some base somewhere on another world. 

Doh! The SolarWinds password was ,"SolarWinds123"!

 

The SolarWinds saga keeps getting worse as time goes by. Several days ago, news broke that some 18,000 companies had been compromised by a nation-state actor. The attackers in question are believed to be affiliated with Cozy Bear, aka APT29, aka the Russian government. The hack has hit multiple US government agencies, the security company FireEye, and a whole lot of other companies.

When these sorts of breaches occur, a major question is how the hackers were able to gain entry in the first place. SolarWinds is a major US company that develops network and infrastructure management software, and it has an enormous client list. It appears security researchers have been trying to get the company to pay attention to major flaws in its defenses for some time.

 

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

16 hours ago, laylalex said:

Does something need to be Top Secret in order for it to be compromising? I'm just sort of asking that in general here. I mean, there is a good (I think) question: why would someone who is working with Russian intelligence at the same time he was working with Manafort (this is in at least one of the cases that came out of the Mueller investigation) receive internal domestic voting data while Manafort is working for the Trump campaign? What is the simple explanation for that? I don't have a simple one or a complicated one. I have nothing.

Looks to me like you're trying to find something out of nothing. Not even Mueller, with his universe-wide scope, did a single thing about this, which tells you how serious it was. Looks like a ball of yarn Russia conspiracy theorists are on their own in trying to weave through.

[Dashinka 24,732]

SolarWinds’ shares drop 22 per cent. But what’s this? $286m in stock sales just before hack announced?
 

Two Silicon Valley VC firms, Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo, sold hundreds of millions of dollars in SolarWinds shares just days before the software biz emerged at the center of a massive hacking campaign.

Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo deny anything untoward.

The two firms owned 70 per cent of SolarWinds, which produces networking monitoring software that was backdoored by what is thought to be state-sponsored Russian spies. This tainted code was installed by thousands of SolarWinds customers including key departments of the US government that were subsequently hacked via the hidden remote access hole.

News of the role SolarWinds' hijacked Orion software played in the hacking spree emerged at the weekend, and on Monday the developer's share price plummeted more than 20 per cent. It is currently down 22 per cent.
 

https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/16/solarwinds_stock_sale/

[laylalex 7,300]

On 12/18/2020 at 5:13 PM, laylalex said:

Manafort isn't paying for the crime of passing internal polling data to Kilimnik though. For all we know, the information -- private information, of course -- was shared with permission, and that wouldn't be a crime at all. The data isn't top secret after all, it's just got some political value. All I was saying was we don't know the why of the sharing. What legitimate use would domestic polling data be to parties outside the US, beyond as, say, for academic research? Why would anyone outside the US care about what the data in Wisconsin were saying? Just a lot of unanswered questions that have zero to do with Swalwell.

 

Reality has no meaning anymore, and I suppose the faster I accept that the happier I'll be. That or reup my Klonopin prescription. 💊

 

On 12/19/2020 at 8:14 AM, Burnt Reynolds said:

Looks to me like you're trying to find something out of nothing. Not even Mueller, with his universe-wide scope, did a single thing about this, which tells you how serious it was. Looks like a ball of yarn Russia conspiracy theorists are on their own in trying to weave through.

Hmmmmmmm I guess I wasn't trying to find something out of nothing after all.

Quote

 

 It was one of the more tantalizing, yet unresolved, questions of the investigation into possible connections between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign: Why was a business associate of campaign chairman Paul Manafort given internal polling data — and what did he do with it?

A Treasury Department statement Thursday offered a potentially significant clue, asserting that Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant, had shared sensitive campaign and polling information with Russian intelligence services.

Kilimnik has long been alleged by U.S. officials to have ties to Russian intelligence. But the statement in a broader Treasury Department sanctions announcement was perhaps the most direct link the U.S. government has ever drawn between the Trump campaign’s inner workings and the Kremlin’s intelligence services. The revelation was all the more startling because it went beyond any allegation made in either special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report or in an even more damning and detailed document released last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Both those investigations were unable to determine what Kilimnik did with the data and whether he shared it further.

 

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russia-campaigns-konstantin-kilimnik-d2fdefdb37077e28eba135e21fce6ebf

 

Treasury statement: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0126