Russia Wanted to be Caught, Says Company Waging War on the DNC Hackers
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Case in point: a July 2015 incident in which a security firm published a blog post about how APT 28 was using a specific zero-day exploit. The group updated the hack the next day, as FireEye focused reporting team manager Kristen Dennesen
told the RSA conference this year.
Porter thinks that’s one piece of evidence that both groups have state sponsorship. You need more than than coding chops to pull off a stunt like that; it helps to have an international intelligence collection network you can work with.
“If these state-backed actors have professional military or intelligence operators overseeing the operation, any change you can make, they’re going to try and find a counter to that,” he said. “They seem to know that certain white papers are going to be public and they make the changes the day before they come out. We’ve seen evidence that they’ve known in advance that someone is going to reveal that they were going to be discovered and they make changes so that they continue uninterrupted.”
Over the past week, U.S. intelligence community officials have said that they have “
high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails from the DNC. That’s an unusually bold statement for the IC to make about a data breach that’s currently moving the news cycle. By contrast, the intelligence community still hasn’t made a formal declaration of attribution about the
OPM hack. Months after the intrusion was revealed, Clapper
acknowledged only that China was the “leading suspect.”
Porter believes that part of the reason that the IC and
multiple cyber security researchers were able to implicate Russia is that Russia was showing off. Consider that on June 15, one day after Crowdstrike
fingered APT 28 and APT 29, a figure named Guccifer 2.0 claimed to have done the hack, alone. But
Twitter users quickly found metadata in Guccifer 2.0’s files that undermined that claim. The docs contained a tag reading “Феликс Эдмундович,” a reference to to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police.
But security expert Jeff Carr thought the smoke off this smoking-gun was a bit too thick. In his minority
report, he asks: what kind of spy ring tags their stolen docs before releasing them under a cover?
“Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add
Iron Felix’s name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor,” he wrote.
You’ll Never Get 100% Certainty in Cyberwar
This shows the effectiveness of information warfare at this moment in history: a malware attack is fundamentally different from a missile strike that can be seen from space and immediately attributed to a party, a unit, a fixed position on earth, and a piece of machinery (if not an individual operator). One hundred percent certainty in any information attack will always be next to impossible, and that
makes it hard to shape policy, legislation, or retribution.
“For U.S. policy makers and a lot of private-sector companies, they tend to be dismissive. They say, ‘Oh, we had a thousand spearphish attacks today.’ The fact that there’s such a huge background noise level in fairly sophisticated cyber crime across so many targets around the world, it allows APT groups to blend in if they want to,” Porter said. “It’s death by a thousand cuts from the perspective of U.S. policy. Any individual cyber criminal act is not a national security concern, but taken in the aggregate, having a high level of cyber crime in general should be a very high-level concern.”
That plays into Russia’s hands. State actors can use headlines about persistent criminal cyber threats to make geopolitical activity look merely criminal.
“If you were to reduce the very high level of cybercrime, states wouldn’t be able to carry out these attacks. They would lose this plausible deniability and it would become a more straightforward attack. I think they want to make it difficult for leaders to have the kind of unambiguous statement that drives policy in a democracy,” Porter said. “They want to make it hard to respond.
But they probably don’t mind getting caught, in the sense that they want to send a message.”
Crowdstrike president Shawn Henry is dubious. “I don’t know what kind of foreign intelligence service conducting a covert operation wants to be found,” he said on Thursday, but added that CrowdStrike picked up the DNC hack within 48 hours and that it “wasn’t difficult.”
If you buy Porter’s theory, the question becomes: what kind of message could the Russians mean to send? The FireEye employee guesses that these sorts of breaches are likely a demonstration of capability, or perhaps a reprisal against the West for sanctions against Russian leaders. It’s an idea that he’s sharing with his private-sector customers.
“I view their activities as, they want to muddy the political response in democracies by making it seem like a complicated and ambiguous issue,” Porter said. If they’re willing to do A, B, and C then you need to understand that it’s not difficult for them to target an individual. That’s what cyber gives them. From Russia, they can pick an individual that they want to bully, using the full resources of a state organization. And that’s unprecedented. So if they decide that they want to pick on a certain corporate executive, maybe they could do a particular, hacktivist style leak. Activists go after companies all the time…it’s hard for a the company to prove that their loss was caused by a state and not by a criminal. So the policy is still complicated. That’s a nice place to be in if you’re Russia.”...