Just reported by Business Insider! I’d heard they had something big in the pipeline and this is it.
In short, a bunch of tech nerds (I love tech nerds!) started digging into Russian-linked hacking and cyber espionage when they came across something strange…
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.
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.
According to the article, a pattern was quickly recognized, but it wasn’t a bot-generated pattern. Rather it mimicked a conversation, and connected the Trump organization with an entity called Alfa Bank in Moscow.
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.
The article goes on to detail the amount of both doubt and diligence that was applied in pursuing this anomaly. More and more evidence signified that the communication wasn’t a fluke and wasn’t a coincidence.
However:
What the scientists amassed wasn’t isn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump advisor whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.
Friends, I my head is still spinning from this report, and its implications. If this is just a coincidence, what explains it? Any techies out there want to take a stab at making sense of what it is happening here?
If I ask if Russia is secretly funneling money to the Trump campaign, does that mean I should go resize my tinfoil hat?