Jan 5, 2017

Obama’s New Year Lame Duck Soup

by Tutisicecream

Grizzly Steppe the Crazy Russian Hack according to the DHS/FBI reportage ordered by a failed president.

As anyone working in the IT business knows phishing attacks happen on a regular basis from servers all over the world and are commonplace on the internet. It is also well known that phishing, when taking place is always done from a slave computer, so it is impossible to know the original source. All you can do is block the compromised slave computer from accessing your network. They do not amount to a cyber attacks in the vague parameters laid out in this New Year Grizzly Steppe squib.
However in keeping with the hallmarks of Obama’s foreign policy failures this reportage, as that is all it is, is being used to bolster the false Russian Hacker narrative. To act as a smoke screen for other more pressing issues on the cyber front for the US homeland security, namely in this case those of the Hillary Clinton e-mails, kept by her on an unofficial unsecured server, which exposed inherent corruption by her at the highest levels as part of his administration.
It is a never ending task for IT departments to winkle out such things as hacks. What is released in this DHS/ FBI effort is not that – just a how phishing is done for dummies – nothing more and nothing that links it to any government hack and definitely not Russia. It appears that in this account they are attributing the location of the slave computer as the location of the source computer and that is wrong, this will never done by anyone who knows how to do this and simply misleading.
The US really needs more substance than presented here to declare an imagined a state of national emergency against Russia – don’t they? Of course it appears to be the final fling of a murderous neo-liberal administration infiltrated by neo-conservatives hell bent on confrontation with Russia – but that’s just my opinion. However don’t expect anything in the way of analysis from the MSM on this and especially the Guardian which brings to bear 3 hacks on the subject and fails miserably to pick out the hopelessness of this piece of deception. Its purpose is to create fear in the minds of a public who are already tired of this faking of the fake’s nonsense.
So let’s look at the 13 page fact-free so called report which goes by the cunningly perception managed name of Grizzly Steppe- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity:

Page 1: Hackneyed Introduction
Pages 2-3: Meaningless graphic which says that "Advanced Persistent Threat 28 and 29" are Russians because – well we say so!
Page 4: A list of hacker groups with Russian type names such as: Pinched Duke (clearly tongue in cheek), Tsar Team, and Energetic Bear etc.- a few names being the only link to anything Russian in the whole sorry exercise. And of course each could be anyone anywhere even dear old Bana in Aleppo.
Page 5: A 19 line PHP script that you can run to see if your server has been infected by any specific root kit.
Pages 6 to 12: Nothing more than standard info on how to secure a server and general advice that has no relation to anything or anybody specific.
Page 13: How to contact the DHS and FBI – possibly to give them advice on what to do next?

Lapped up by the MSM there is nothing of substance here, but it has led to Obama getting his rattle thrown out of the pram, tit for tat diplomatic spat moment – unfortunately Putin has decided not to respond. The only pages that even pretend to be anything are pages 2, 3, and 4. Those pages are completely devoid of any incriminating facts pointing to a Russian hack. The other 10 pages don't contain anything other than standard advice and info on phishing and the new media buzz-word spear phishing.
Clearly Obama’s Lame Duck Soup is a failed attempt at revenge being a dish best served cold – without the shot of vodka.
Link to Grizzly Steppe