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Slate : Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?

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M

maquiladora

Member
I said wow....

It's a long article, I'd recommend reading the whole thing.

This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.
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In late spring, this community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee, an attack persuasively detailed by the respected cyber-security firm CrowdStrike. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.
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In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.
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The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.
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The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. “I’ve never seen a server set up like that,” says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc, and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks.
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That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses.
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Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the Internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence.
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It’s possible to impute political motives to the computer scientists, some of whom have criticized Trump on social media. But many of the scientists who talked to me for this story are Republicans. And almost all have strong incentives for steering clear of controversy. Some work at public institutions, where they are vulnerable to political pressure. Others work for firms that rely on government contracts—a relationship that tends to squash positions that could be misinterpreted as outspoken.
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To build out the bank, Fridman recruited a skilled economist and shrewd operator called Pyotr Aven. In the early nineties, Aven worked with Vladimir Putin in the St Petersburg government—and according to several accounts, helped Putin wiggle out of accusations of corruption that might have derailed his ascent. (Karen Dawisha recounts this history in her book, Putin’s Kleptocracy.) Over time, Alfa built one of the world’s most lucrative enterprises. Fridman became the second richest man in Russia, valued by Forbes at $15.3 billion.
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Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.
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frank3.png
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According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...p_organization_communicating_with_russia.html
 
N

NandoGip

Member
Surprised: No one. I'm waiting for the "bombshell" when evidence is presented about Trumps ties in the coming weeks/months.
 
G

Gutek

Member
Typical Democrats, bringing up the Russians when they fail. You don't know it was the Russians. Wouldn't it be better if we all just got along?
 
R

rjinaz

Member
Sounds like good relationship building with
Mother
Russia. What's wrong with that? You want a war?!
 
S

studyguy

Member
Funny, it shoots way up right as Manafort leaves in Aug.
Hmmmmm I wonder who joined his campaign then...

You'd think it would have been higher when Manafort was there.
 
B

BreezyLimbo

Banned
The media isnt going to care about this.

Trump could be buttfucking Putin and the media would still be like "BUT TEH FBI REOPENED THE EMAILS THEY HABE 650000 NOW".

This is annoying
Just one more week
 
B

blackjaw

Member
Story won't go anywhere, it's too technical for the average American....needs more easy words like email and classified
 
D

DogDude

Member
The Russia ties have yet to play well and I don't see this any different. We need a another audio tape. They almost certainly exist.
 
Monocle

Monocle

Member
It’s possible to impute political motives to the computer scientists, some of whom have criticized Trump on social media. But many of the scientists who talked to me for this story are Republicans. And almost all have strong incentives for steering clear of controversy. Some work at public institutions, where they are vulnerable to political pressure. Others work for firms that rely on government contracts—a relationship that tends to squash positions that could be misinterpreted as outspoken.
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This right here gives the claims serious weight. When experts show you evidence that undermines rather than supports their own interests, pay special attention.
 
Chiggs

Chiggs

Gold Member
I have to admit, as someone who follows the news it's really hard to make sense of all the stuff coming out in the last 72 hours.

Similar to how questionable Comey's decision to announce additional emails was, I also have to question the timing on this.Seems like two sides really slinging crap at teach other and the hate is about as palpable as it has ever been,
 
L

Lightning_Roller

Banned
What the fuck?! What the...what?! I mean why? Who?! I.....this election goddamn. I want Trump dump and the sorry ass club band to go down in flames on the 8th.

FLAMES!!!!!
 
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