some follow up about atlantic council article - Same author wrote both these articles, interesting timing
JUNE 14 No nation states involved, stole oppo research about Trump
There are “no certain links” between foreign nation states and the hackers who breached the Democratic National Committee’s computer network and accessed opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
“Not all such attacks are state sponsored—it’s not hard to imagine many motivations for someone wanting to get access to the DNC network,”
Even though there is no hard evidence of a direct connection between the hackers and the Russian government,
CrowdStrike’s investigation into the breach is ongoing.
“At this point, we are still making guesses.”
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/dnc-hack-no-certain-links-to-foreign-governments
JUNE 15
[DNC created the Russia hack narrative themselves, no intel analysis]
DNC’s decision. They thought it was very important to highlight to the American public that this is a national security story and they wanted to highlight what the Russians were doing to the US political system—that was very important
[this makes no sense if Putin ordered the hack]
“There was no indication that they even knew about each other, which is not surprising because Russian intelligence services almost never cooperate with each other and it’s a very adversarial relationship between them,” said Alperovitch
[no reason to act like the “hack” was an act of war]
Alperovitch: These are Russian intelligence operators. This is traditional espionage. This is what the US government does day in and day out. This is what other foreign intelligence agencies are doing. Of course, this activity is illegal, but it’s a widely accepted practice so it’s highly unlikely that we will do much of anything going forward.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russian-cyber-attacks-in-the-united-states-will-intensify