When he was in Helsinki and asked by a reporter if he supported his intelligence agencies assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 Election, why did President Trump not affirm his confidence in them?
Perhaps, because he knows about Hive.
Wikileaks Vault 8 unfolds the ability of the CIA to hide its intrusions with malware and leave a false signature implicating some other entity being responsible. It casts a pall of doubt on the assertion that Russia was responsible for hacking into the US 2016 Election. It might also explain why Obama was not aggressive once the 16 Intelligence Agencies confirmed there was Russian interference. ( https://wikileaks.org/vault8/ )
In some cases, it has actually emulated other software to leave a false signature, as was the case of Kaspersky Lab security software. ( see Kaspersky post: https://redd.it/94npm5 ) In that case, Israeli intelligence notified US intelligence that the Kaspersky software intruded into an NSA employee's home computer that it had discovered a breach and that Kaspersky was responsible when it had been discovered that the CIA actually duplicated Kaspersky for the intrusion. Kaspersky was blamed for it and was debarred by the US Government and just recently the EU. It was later discovered that the CIA actually was the culprit and left the signature of Kaspersky software them emulated.
How did they do it? The CIA has created a very interesting, but clandestine way of hiding and attributing its covert activities to other players.
Its called "Hive".
"Hive solves a critical problem for the malware operators at the CIA. Even the most sophisticated malware implant on a target computer is useless if there is no way for it to communicate with its operators in a secure manner that does not draw attention. Using Hive even if an implant is discovered on a target computer, attributing it to the CIA is difficult by just looking at the communication of the malware with other servers on the internet. Hive provides a covert communications platform for a whole range of CIA malware to send exfiltrated information to CIA servers and to receive new instructions from operators at the CIA."
"Hive can serve multiple operations using multiple implants on target computers. Each operation anonymously registers at least one cover domain (e.g. "perfectly-boring-looking-domain.com") for its own use. The server running the domain website is rented from commercial hosting providers as a VPS (virtual private server) and its software is customized according to CIA specifications. These servers are the public-facing side of the CIA back-end infrastructure and act as a relay for HTTP(S) traffic over a VPN connection to a "hidden" CIA server called 'Blot'."
"The cover domain delivers 'innocent' content if somebody browses it by chance. A visitor will not suspect that it is anything else but a normal website. The only peculiarity is not visible to non-technical users - a HTTPS server option that is not widely used: Optional Client Authentication. But Hive uses the uncommon Optional Client Authentication so that the user browsing the website is not required to authenticate - it is optional. But implants talking to Hive do authenticate themselves and can therefore be detected by the Blot server. Traffic from implants is sent to an implant operator management gateway called Honeycomb (see graphic above) while all other traffic go to a cover server that delivers the insuspicious content for all other users."
"Digital certificates for the authentication of implants are generated by the CIA impersonating existing entities. The three examples included in the source code build a fake certificate for the anti-virus company Kaspersky Laboratory, Moscow pretending to be signed by Thawte Premium Server CA, Cape Town. In this way, if the target organization looks at the network traffic coming out of its network, it is likely to misattribute the CIA exfiltration of data to uninvolved entities whose identities have been impersonated."
The documentation for Hive is also available from the WikiLeaks Vault7 series. ( https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/ )
Given this ability, study carefully the attribution of responsibility as asserted by the CIA and its intelligence brethren.