F6 this is from Wired .. .. it doesn't sound settled to me .. I didn't follow up on this one from Wired .. I got involved in something wonderful .. ;) tasting.. that is ..............;)
Questions about the Democratic National Committee hack and Russia’s alleged involvement have been swirling for months, and have intensified as the intelligence community prepares to brief president-elect Donald Trump about its conclusions on Friday and release a declassified report next week. Ahead of this announcement, the DNC told Buzzfeed on Wednesday that neither the FBI nor any other intelligence agency ever did an independent assessment of the organization’s breached servers. Instead, they alleged, the FBI relied exclusively on information from private digital forensics company Crowdstrike. Now the FBI is refuting this account of the events.
In a statement to WIRED, a senior FBI law enforcement official wrote in an email Thursday that “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated.” This contrasts with what DNC deputy communications director Eric Walker told Buzzfeed in an email: “The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers.”
In its statement, the FBI agreed with the DNC’s implication that it had instead relied on data from Crowdstrike. But the Bureau points the finger for its lack of independent evaluation squarely at the DNC. According to the FBI official, “This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier.”
When asked about the FBI’s comments and the two institutions’ differing accounts of events, the DNC referred WIRED to its statement to Buzzfeed on Wednesday.
So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers? What is going on?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017
On Thursday evening Trump tweeted that the DNC’s claim raises fundamental questions about whether a hack even occurred at the DNC at all. But whether the DNC was hacked is not in doubt. On that point the DNC and FBI agree that the hack happened. Third party evidence revealed an intrusion regardless of intelligence community findings (which also agree that a hack occurred).
The possibility that the FBI based its investigation on inferior-quality evidence is significant, though, as the US government and public try to assess the intelligence community’s Russia attribution. The Obama administration issued sanctions against Russian intelligence groups last week, but Trump and others have raised doubts about the conclusion that Russia was behind various incidents of election meddling, including the DNC hack. Meanwhile, in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday morning, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper alleged that Russia was involved in fake news operations and disinformation campaigns during the US presidential campaign season.
Still, the attribution of the DNC hack to Russia has been extensively vetted by multiple agencies within the US intelligence community as well as the civilian infosec community. Even given healthy skepticism, the overall consensus from both groups is that Russia orchestrated and executed the hacking campaigns. Officials told the Washington Post on Thursday that one factor intelligence agencies considered in their attribution was intercepted communications in which Russian officials openly celebrated Donald Trump’s election and Hillary Clinton’s loss as a political boon to the Kremlin. The Post reports that some of the revelers were Russian officials who knew about initiatives to interfere with the US presidential campaigns.
At the time of publication, the FBI had not yet responded to a request for comment from WIRED about whether it feels that it missed out on higher caliber evidence in investigating the DNC breach or whether it was satisfied with the evidence it collected through other channels. NBC News reporter Ken Dilanian tweeted on Wednesday that a “source close to the investigation says FBI didn’t need the DNC servers because it already had the forensic data from upstream collection.”
The FBI official’s characterization that the DNC “caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier” is somewhat at odds with a report published by the New York Times in mid-December, which indicated that the FBI originally took a “low-key approach” to notifying the DNC about suspicious activity the Bureau had detected on the DNC’s network. In that reported version of the timeline, it wasn’t until seven months after the initial (half-hearted) FBI warning that the DNC was first motivated to defend its network.
At the Senate hearing on Thursday, NSA director Michael Rogers said, “The biggest frustration to me is speed, speed, speed. We have got to get faster. We have got to be more agile.”
Updated 1/5/17 7:30 p.m. to include response from the Democratic National Committee. Updated 1/5/17 8:00 p.m. to include Donald Trump’s tweet.
as I said, I didn't follow up on this to see if they had printed something else .. nor did I read the report .. what 13 page report? at buzz feed .. so ... I'm not feeling strong about any of it . but I did trust the last administration ... also .. not completely sold on 'the hill' ....yes, I use it ... but still not sold .... I wonder what the guys at vox ... etc... said about it ............truly I don't care . I still wouldn't trust anything that tunayielding website put up ... no matter what ... ... your reputation goes with you! ....
The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
?????? ?????? ??-??????
By ERIC LIPTON, DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANEDEC. 13, 2016
A filing cabinet broken into in 1972 as part of the Watergate burglary sits beside a computer server that Russian hackers breached during the 2016 presidential campaign at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.
His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.
The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks.
Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impostor.
“I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his contact with the F.B.I.
It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump.
Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones.
What is phishing?
Phishing uses an innocent-looking email to entice unwary recipients to click on a deceptive link, giving hackers access to their information or a network. In “spear-phishing,” the email is tailored to fool a specific person.
An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack.
The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.
The low-key approach of the F.B.I. meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later.
Even Mr. Podesta, a savvy Washington insider who had written a 2014 report on cyberprivacy for President Obama, did not truly understand the gravity of the hacking.
Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, incorrectly legitimized a phishing email sent to the personal account of John D. Podesta, the campaign chairman.
By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times. Mr. Trump gleefully cited many of the purloined emails on the campaign trail.
The fallout included the resignations of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the D.N.C., and most of her top party aides. Leading Democrats were sidelined at the height of the campaign, silenced by revelations of embarrassing emails or consumed by the scramble to deal with the hacking. Though little-noticed by the public, confidential documents taken by the Russian hackers from the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, turned up in congressional races in a dozen states, tainting some of them with accusations of scandal.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a reception last week at the Kremlin in Moscow. Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky
In recent days, a skeptical president-elect, the nation’s intelligence agencies and the two major parties have become embroiled in an extraordinary public dispute over what evidence exists that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia moved beyond mere espionage to deliberately try to subvert American democracy and pick the winner of the presidential election.
Many of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides believe that the Russian assault had a profound impact on the election, while conceding that other factors — Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate; her private email server; the public statements of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, about her handling of classified information — were also important.
While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.
Oh YES, AND much more with a thousand embedded links . .. not kidding ... I'm done for a bit . .but there is MORE ..much more....I don't think any of this was caused with a purpose by the dnc ... I still blame Russia's PUTIN! .. period ... if people want to blame the DNC .. I know they will just as they did for two gd years ... I think under the circumstances .. no one but the ones who did the hacks meant harm .. Russia's PUTIN! . .that's it .. yeah shit happens .. all the time .. god knows I'll need a bit more time to applaud Comey .. ;) ... even though I'm not nor was ever as mad at him as some were .. I go into a cold spell and nothing, no one can get through until .. until ... I warm up .. which can be never or so far always sometime .. ;) And I expect nothing less from that fake news lover to want to blame the dnc for a hack that was committed by the country that his hero trump has forever loved ... I'm not putting up with him criticizing anyone but trump ... and just like trump .. the only ones he criticizes are us .. ... I'm not up for it I over look him mostly .... but at times not ... perhaps I've overlooked too much .. don't know .. anyway .. ... ;) see you all later! And hope this helps you in figuring out who you/he want to blame .. I got mine! .. .. ;-)
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
