A Putin-sponsored October surprise? - By Dana Milbank
The Russians have just given us an August glimpse of a potential October surprise.
We learned earlier this summer that cyber-hackers widely believed to be tied to the Kremlin have broken into the email of the Democratic National Committee and others. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported Monday night that Russian hackers have also been targeting state voter-registration systems. And, in an apparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, they’re leaking what they believe to be the most damaging documents at strategic points in the campaign.
Last week, we learned something else: The Russians aren’t just hackers — they’re also hacks. Turns out that before leaking their stolen information, they are in some cases doctoring the documents, making edits that add false information and then passing the documents off as the originals.
Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll reported last week that the hackers goofed: They posted both the original versions of at least three documents and their edited versions. These documents, stolen from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, were altered by the hackers to create the false impression that Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was funded by Soros. A pro-Russian hacking group, CyberBerkut, had inserted Navalny’s name, bogus dollar amounts and fabricated wording.
This raises an intriguing possibility: Are Vladimir Putin’s operatives planning to dump edited DNC documents on the eve of the presidential election?
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-putin-sponsored-october-surprise/2016/08/29/d7f21d16-6e33-11e6-9705-23e51a2f424d_story.html?utm_term=.779f4cdfa8d3&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
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If you were the reputed-to-be Russian hacker, would you release data implicating yourself? NO!!!
If you were the reputed-to-be Republican hacker, would you release data implicating Russians? YES!!!
Yes, there are Russian hackers working for the state, just like there are American hackers working for American intelligence branches. And yes, Russian hackers may have released data with edits. But, that does not mean they are the hackers who hacked the Dems. It does mean they are most useful to hide who the actual hacker of the Dem servers is.
