Homeland Security News Wire

The Russia watch Russian hackers & the Seth Rich conspiracy; leaked chats & Russian spy; what is QAnon?, and more

Published 3 August 2018

•  Former FBI agent: Russia helped Trump get elected

•  How Russian hackers amplified the Seth Rich conspiracy until it reached Donald Trump and the CIA

•  Russia’s disinformation “toolkit” going global, experts say

•  Leaked chats show alleged Russian spy seeking hacking tools

•  The Trump team is running a disinformation campaign about Russian interference

•  Social media analysts: Public information campaign needed to combat Russian disinformation

•  Experts: Russian influence efforts constitute “informational warfare,” span beyond election

•  What is QAnon? The origins of the bizarre conspiracy theory claiming Trump-Russia investigation is a hoax to catch pedophiles

Former FBI agent: Russia helped Trump get elected (Justin Wise, The Hill)
A former FBI special agent who tracked the online activity of extremist groups in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election said this week that he believes Russian hacking and disinformation campaigns in 2016 helped President Trump get elected.
“Yes. I think just alone the hacking, particularly of the [Democratic National Committee] and the time to release by WikiLeaks and DCLeaks and others of hacked materials offset the media narrative,” Clint Watts said on the Yahoo News podcast “Bots & Ballots” when asked if Russian hacking efforts helped Trump get elected.
 “If you go back to the infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape of Donald Trump, it was immediately followed by the release, within an hour I believe, of hacked emails to try and distract from that narrative, and to essentially inundate that media space with other coverage,” he added.
Watts, who has been a staunch critic of Trump, looked into the online activities of groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) during the 2016 presidential campaign, Yahoo reported. He was also among the first to track Russian bots operating social media campaigns and he testified on his findings before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2017.
Watts added that the FBI had taken note of Russia’s disinformation campaign on social media in 2014.
“That’s when you saw the message start to pop up that the [Syrian President Bashar] Assad regime needs to stay in power, and the signatures didn’t look quite right,” Watts said. “So when we stayed on that storm of social media accounts, they always supported a narrative that was always pro-Russian.”
Watts said the messaging from those accounts gradually began to shift, with the themes being about social issues inside the U.S. He added that many agents in the FBI believed the biggest goal for Russia was to advance Trump’s presidential bid.
His comments, which align with the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the goal of helping Trump win.

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  Russian hackers & the Seth Rich conspiracy; leaked chats & Russian spy; what is QAnon?, and more

  How Russian hackers amplified the Seth Rich conspiracy until it reached Donald Trump and the CIA (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
  A new report claims that Russian hackers altered dates in stolen documents to frame the DNC staffer for the theft.
  Russia’s disinformation “toolkit” going global, experts say (Olivia Gazis, CBS News)
  Elements of Russia’s disinformation “toolkit” are being imitated and implemented by other foreign actors like China, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to sow discord and gain political advantage, according to two policy experts who study those practices. Laura Rosenberger and Jamie Fly, two former high-level foreign policy aides from opposite sides of the political spectrum who partner at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a national security advocacy group housed by the German Marshall Fund, say that Russia has not only broadened the range of its interference techniques to include financial tools since 2016, but that those techniques are seeing broader application by other authoritarian regimes.
  Leaked chats show alleged Russian spy seeking hacking tools (Raphael Satter and Matthew Bodner, Associated Press)
  Six years ago, a Russian-speaking cybersecurity researcher received an unsolicited email from Kate S. Milton.
  Milton claimed to work for the Moscow-based anti-virus firm Kaspersky. In an exchange that began in halting English and quickly switched to Russian, Milton said she was impressed by the researcher’s work on exploits — the digital lock picks used by hackers to break into vulnerable systems — and wanted to be copied in on any new ones that the researcher came across.
  “You almost always have all the top-end exploits,” Milton said, after complimenting the researcher about a post to her website, where she often dissected malicious software.
  “So that our contact isn’t one-sided, I’d offer you my help analyzing malicious viruses, and as I get new samples I’ll share,” Milton continued. “What do you think?”
  The researcher — who works as a security engineer and runs the malware-sharing site on the side — always had a pretty good idea that Milton wasn’t who she said she was. Last month, she got confirmation via an FBI indictment.
  The Trump team is running a disinformation campaign about Russian interference (Aaron Blake, Washington Post)
  Most of the headlines from Vice President Pence’s cybersecurity speech Tuesday focused on how he clearly enunciated what President Trump won’t: that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. And he did.
  But the full context of what Pence said is far less antithetical to Trump — and is part of a long-running disinformation campaign the Trump administration has waged for a year and a half. Even in flatly tagging Russia as the perpetrator, Pence inserted a carefully worded caveat that can’t help but undersell the problem and damage efforts to prevent a repeat in 2018.
  Here’s what he said, per the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima (emphasis added): “Russia’s goal was to sow discord and division and weaken the American people’s faith in our democracy,” Pence said. “And while no actual votes were changed, any attempt to interfere in our elections is an affront to our democracy, and it will not be allowed. The United States of America will not tolerate any foreign interference in our elections from any nation-state — not from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or anyone else. As President Trump said, ‘We’re not going to have it.’”
  “No actual votes were changed.” This is a regular talking point offered by the White House, and has been for months. At times, officials including Pence and even then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo have wrongly ascribed this conclusion to the intelligence community, which pointedly said it would not offer any such conclusion. But more and more, it’s being thrown out there without such attribution. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) even said a version of it. “It’s also clear that it didn’t have a material effect,” Ryan said.
  But here’s the thing: This is a laughable contention. It’s not serious. And any politician with an ounce of campaign experience and logic knows it.
  There were nearly 140 million votes in the 2016 presidential election. To make this claim, you would have to get in the heads of virtually every voter (and potential voter who stayed home) in America and psychoanalyze their decisions. It’s impossible. The odds that not a single, solitary vote hinged on anything the Russians injected into our campaign is virtually nil.
  That’s especially true given the most recent indictments in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation. Last month, 12 Russian military intelligence officers were indicted on a charge of hacking Democrats’ computers and distributing the information during the 2016 election. The emails distributed by WikiLeaks dominated the news for days. This wasn’t just some Russian bots pushing dubious fake news to a few thousand people on social media; this was Russia inserting a major story line into the 2016 election that wouldn’t have existed if not for its efforts.
  It would be one thing for Pence to say, “I don’t think Russia changed the winner of the election.” Okay. That’s still complete guesswork based upon nothing, but at least it’s plausible. Yet that’s not the argument here; the argument is that it didn’t change any votes.
  Pence and his allies will probably argue that his comment referred only to Russians hacking actual voting machines or changing totals — which the intelligence community has said it found no evidence of. If you were the fact-checker, you’d probably have to knock a Pinocchio or two off for that. But the context of his remarks include nothing about hacking; they’re about influencing the election. The impression that’s left is that he’s talking about Russia being completely unsuccessful in shifting even one vote with its interference.
  The full volume of the Trump administration’s comments on this topic can’t be ignored either. This fits neatly with what can only be described as an effort to mislead and obfuscate in the name of keeping Trump happy by downplaying the idea that Russia elected him. Officials have regularly sought to cast doubt upon not just the idea that Russia’s interference mattered, but also that it favored Trump and even that it was ordered by Vladimir Putin. Oftentimes, like Pence, they choose their words carefully so they are at least defensible, while being clearly misleading.
  Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in recent weeks has made great pains on multiple occasions to avoid publicly agreeing with some of the intelligence community’s conclusions. At the Aspen Security Forum two weeks ago, she blamed the interference on “Russian government actors,” even though the intel community’s report directly blames Putin. She also argued there was no evidence Russia favored either political party in its attacks on “our election infrastructure,” specifically. Why Russia would favor Trump generally but not in that area is anybody’s guess, but Nielsen decided it was important to insert that caveat. Much like Pence’s comment, this aimed to be perhaps strictly true and defensible, while being completely misleading to everyday Americans.
  This might seem like so much nitpicking, but consider this: Our intelligence community evaluates that Russia is still trying to impact American elections. Part of thwarting that effort involves the public bringing pressure to bear on elected officials to take action. If Pence is in one breath saying Russia interfered but also suggesting it didn’t matter one bit, there will be considerably less impetus for action among those who are inclined to believe him.
  That’s the real danger of these false and misleading talking points. These officials are undoubtedly trying to avoid alienating Trump, who in recent weeks has demonstrated he still wants to cast doubt on Russian interference. But catering to him and obscuring the truth comes with real-world costs.
  Social media analysts: Public information campaign needed to combat Russian disinformation (Bryan Renbaum, TMN)
  Social media analysts told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that a public information campaign is necessary to combat Russian disinformation. “There is a need to build resilience in target populations. This will include a long-term effort to implement media literacy training and integrate such training into classrooms,” said Todd Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. “We recommend immediate action to identify and eliminate malign influence campaigns, and to educate the public in preparation for the 2018 elections,” said Renee DiResta, who is director of research at New Knowledge.“Users need more context from the origin of the information and why they see it, including disclosure of automated accounts while protecting anonymity,” said Laura Rosenberger, director, Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
  Experts: Russian influence efforts constitute “informational warfare”, span beyond election (CBS News)
  Experts were in agreement on Wednesday during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s latest hearing into foreign actor’s attempts to interfere in the U.S. election process that influence efforts being carried out by Russia and other adversaries constitutes “informational warfare” and that Americans must be aware their efforts span far beyond the U.S. election system. Panelists from organizations like RAND, Graphika and the Alliance for Securing Democracy urged lawmakers that Russia’s attacks on the democratic process are far greater than a single election, pointing to disinformation campaigns that seek to weaken western institutions as well as target world industries.
  Leaked chats show alleged Russian spy seeking hacking tools (Raphael Satter and Matthew Bodner, AP)
  Six years ago, a Russian-speaking cybersecurity researcher received an unsolicited email from Kate S. Milton. Milton claimed to work for the Moscow-based anti-virus firm Kaspersky. In an exchange that began in halting English and quickly switched to Russian, Milton said she was impressed by the researcher’s work on exploits — the digital lock picks used by hackers to break into vulnerable systems — and wanted to be copied in on any new ones that the researcher came across. The researcher — who works as a security engineer and runs the malware-sharing site on the side — always had a pretty good idea that Milton wasn’t who she said she was. Last month, she got confirmation via an FBI indictment.
  What is QAnon? The origins of the bizarre conspiracy theory claiming Trump-Russia investigation is a hoax to catch pedophiles (Andrew Griffin, The Independent)
  If QAnon’s claims were true, they would shake the very foundations of global government and explain the confusion of politics in recent years. As it is, they are not true – but their importance could nonetheless be hugely significant. It might have been destined to stay as an underground conspiracy theory. But it has quickly taken root both online and off – becoming a feature of Trump rallies and being shared by some of the most important people in the media. It is undeniably dark: it accuses some of the most powerful people in the world of some of the most heinous crimes. And it remains mostly mysterious.
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