In a first, U.S. blames Russia for cyber attacks on energy grid
Dustin Volz, Timothy Gardner March 15, 2018 / 11:26 AM / Updated 17 hours ago
World News WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Thursday blamed the Russian government for a campaign of cyber attacks stretching back at least two years that targeted the U.S. power grid, marking the first time the United States has publicly accused Moscow of hacking into American energy infrastructure.
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Beginning in March 2016, or possibly earlier, Russian government hackers sought to penetrate multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation and manufacturing, according to a U.S. security alert published Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security and FBI said in the alert that a “multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors” had targeted the networks of small commercial facilities “where they staged malware, conducted spear phishing, and gained remote access into energy sector networks.” The alert did not name facilities or companies targeted.
The direct condemnation of Moscow represented an escalation in the Trump administration’s attempts to deter Russia’s aggression in cyberspace, after senior U.S. intelligence officials said in recent weeks the Kremlin believes it can launch hacking operations against the West with impunity.
It coincided with a decision Thursday by the U.S. Treasury Department to impose sanctions on 19 Russian people and five groups, including Moscow’s intelligence services, for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other malicious cyber attacks.
Russia in the past has denied it has tried to hack into other countries’ infrastructure, and vowed on Thursday to retaliate for the new sanctions. ‘UNPRECEDENTED AND EXTRAORDINARY’
U.S. security officials have long warned that the United States may be vulnerable to debilitating cyber attacks from hostile adversaries. It was not clear what impact the attacks had on the firms that were targeted.
But Thursday’s alert provided a link to an analysis by the U.S. cyber security firm Symantec last fall that said a group it had dubbed Dragonfly had targeted energy companies in the United States and Europe and in some cases broke into the core systems that control the companies’ operations.
Malicious email campaigns dating back to late 2015 were used to gain entry into organizations in the United States, Turkey and Switzerland, and likely other countries, Symantec said at the time, though it did not name Russia as the culprit.
The decision by the United States to publicly attribute hacking attempts of American critical infrastructure was “unprecedented and extraordinary,” said Amit Yoran, a former U.S. official who founded DHS’s Computer Emergency Response Team.
“I have never seen anything like this,” said Yoran, now chief executive of the cyber firm Tenable, said.
A White House National Security Council spokesman did not respond when asked what specifically prompted the public blaming of Russia. U.S. officials have historically been reluctant to call out such activity in part because the United States also spies on infrastructure in other parts of the world.
News of the hacking campaign targeting U.S. power companies first surfaced in June in a confidential alert to industry that described attacks on industrial firms, including nuclear plants, but did not attribute blame.
“People sort of suspected Russia was behind it, but today’s statement from the U.S. government carries a lot of weight,” said Ben Read, manager for cyber espionage analysis with cyber security company FireEye Inc.
ENGINEERS TARGETED
The campaign targeted engineers and technical staff with access to industrial controls, suggesting the hackers were interested in disrupting operations, though FireEye has seen no evidence that they actually took that step, Read said.
A former senior DHS official familiar with the government response to the campaign said that Russia’s targeting of infrastructure networks dropped off after the publication in the fall of Symantec’s research and an October government alert, which detailed technical forensics about the hacking attempts but did not name Russia.
The official declined to say whether the campaign was still ongoing or provide specifics on which targets were breached, or how close hackers may have gotten to operational control systems.
“We did not see them cross into the control networks,” DHS cyber security official Rick Driggers told reporters at a dinner on Thursday evening.
Driggers said he was unaware of any cases of control networks being compromised in the United States and that the breaches were limited to business networks. But, he added, “We know that there is intent there.”
It was not clear what Russia’s motive was. Many cyber security experts and former U.S. officials say such behavior is generally espionage-oriented with the potential, if needed, for sabotage.
Russia has shown a willingness to leverage access into energy networks for damaging effect in the past. Kremlin-linked hackers were widely blamed for two attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid in 2015 and 2016, that caused temporary blackouts for hundreds of thousands of customers and were considered first-of-their-kind assaults.
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Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, asked the Trump administration earlier this month to provide a threat assessment gauging Russian capabilities to breach the U.S. electric grid.
It was the third time Cantwell and other senators had asked for such a review. The administration has not yet responded, a spokesman for Cantwell’s office said on Thursday.
Last July, there were news reports that the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corp, which operates a nuclear plant in Kansas, had been targeted by hackers from an unknown origin.
Spokeswoman Jenny Hageman declined to say at the time if the plant had been hacked but said that there had been no operational impact to the plant because operational computer systems were separate from the corporate network. Hageman on Thursday said the company does not comment on security matters.
John Keeley, a spokesman for the industry group the Nuclear Energy Institute, said: “There has been no successful cyber attack against any U.S. nuclear facility, including Wolf Creek.”
Reporting by Dustin Volz and Timothy Gardner, additional reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Tom Brown, Alistair Bell and Cynthia Osterman
Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. Says
The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems, and could have sabotaged or shut power plants off at will.
United States officials and private security firms saw the attacks as a signal by Moscow that it could disrupt the West’s critical facilities in the event of a conflict.
They said the strikes accelerated in late 2015, at the same time the Russian interference in the American election was underway. The attackers had compromised some operators in North America and Europe by spring 2017, after President Trump was inaugurated.
Note: some recent dates on these Mueller/Russian summaries from original F6 big ones are incorrect. The one this replies to should be Thursday, 03/15/18, suggesting the previous two also were not correct.
The twentieth
Forget witch hunt, Mueller probe is “a felony hunt”
In Russia probes, Republicans draw red line at Trump’s finances Top Republicans on Capitol Hill have made a concerted decision in their Russia inquiries: They are staying away from digging into the finances of President Donald Trump and his family. Six Republican leaders of key committees told CNN they see little reason to pursue those lines of inquiry or made no commitments to do so — even as Democrats say determining whether there was a financial link between Trump, his family, his business and Russians is essential to understanding whether there was any collusion in the 2016 elections. Republicans have resisted calls to issue subpoenas for bank records, seeking Trump’s tax returns or sending letters to witnesses to determine whether there were any Trump financial links to Russian actors — calling the push nothing more than a Democratic fishing expedition. [...] http://fox2now.com/2018/02/26/in-russia-probes-republicans-draw-red-line-at-trumps-finances/
Trump’s Real Scandal Is Hiding in Plain Sight The emphasis placed on whether the Trump team colluded with Russia to interfere in the election threatens to overshadow the scandal in plain sight. There was a time when the White House’s frequent denials of collusion with Russia appeared largely defensive. Over time, however, their primary purpose has morphed. These days, the denials serve instead to distract from the ever-clearer picture of a president surrounded by crooks and liars. “Consistently we have said there was no collusion,” Ivanka Trump told NBC News Monday. “There was no collusion. And we believe that Mueller will do his work and reach that same conclusion.” That echoes her father and a White House statement from February 16, after Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted a group of Russians for interfering in the election. “President Donald J. Trump ... is glad to see the Special Counsel’s investigation further indicates—that there was NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia and that the outcome of the election was not changed or affected,” the press secretary wrote. Collusion with Russia may or may not turn out to be a real scandal, depending on what Mueller finds, but it is not the only scandal. (Indeed, while the question of whether any crime was committed remains open, the contacts with Russia that are already known, from George Papadopoulos to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, make these denials ring hollow.) The scale of dishonesty and criminality that is now apparent is an enormous scandal in its own right. On Friday, Rick Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements. He faced a much longer slate of charges, but agreed to cooperate with Mueller. Gates’s troubles with the truth were so severe that he went to the outlandish length of lying to Mueller during a meeting about a plea deal. (It didn’t work, and ended up producing one of the charges to which he pleaded guilty.) Gates came into the Trump orbit through his mentor and business partner Paul Manafort, who served for a time as Trump campaign chairman, but that shouldn’t cloak his deep involvement in Trump world: He was deputy chairman of the campaign, staying on after Manafort was ousted in August 2016; he served as deputy chair of the Trump inaugural committee; and he helped found America First Policies, an outside support group, remaining there until he was pushed out as his legal troubles increased. Then there’s Manafort, who Trump decided to place atop his campaign in spring 2016, and who led it through the crucial period of the Republican National Convention. Manafort steadfastly denies any wrongdoing, but a pair of documents from Mueller unsealed last week reveal a brutal array of documentary evidence against him, including technological troubles in producing a doctored profit-and-loss statement and what appears to be a note to his son-in-law instructing him to mislead a bank appraiser. The White House has distanced itself from Manafort and Gates by pointing out that the crimes with which they are charged occurred outside the auspices of the campaign. This might be convincing if Mueller’s indictments merely sketched out tax fraud—a not-altogether-uncommon private crime. But Mueller alleges that fraud was a core instrument of Davis Manafort, the men’s company. In a new indictment released Friday, Mueller alleges that Manafort worked to create a ring of European leaders who would boost Ukraine’s reputation around the world, while making sure their compensation was invisible. What was Trump seeking when he brought Manafort on? Presumably, he sought the skills that Manafort and Gates had perfected working for leaders in places like Ukraine—the very business that centered on fraud. (It’s worth noting, once again, the bizarre reality that Manafort offered to work for Trump for free.) And even after he pushed Manafort out, in part because of renewed scrutiny of his past work, Trump kept Gates in his inner circle. The dishonor roll doesn’t end there. Manafort and Gates seem to have at least been somewhat effective lobbyists, registered or not. Michael Flynn was not so successful. Flynn, having allegedly failed to disclose foreign travel when renewing his security clearance in 2016, entered into a lobbying scheme on behalf of Turkey—though he didn’t file documents acknowledging that until 2017. In the course of that work, Flynn suddenly espoused views of the Turkish government diametrically opposed to what he’d previously said, and, according to former CIA Director and Trump adviser James Woolsey, discussed a plan to kidnap the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen from exile in the United States and take him to Turkey, where he is accused of fomenting a 2016 coup. Flynn appears to have continued this work right up until the moment he was designated as the incoming national-security adviser in November 2016. He didn’t disclose the work, even though as the president’s right-hand man on security and defense issues he would have dealt closely with Turkey. Flynn was also involved in a bizarre civilian-nuclear-reactor scheme in the Middle East and reportedly continued to push the scheme even after becoming national-security adviser. Somehow, none of this—nor Barack Obama’s explicit warning to Trump about Flynn—was enough of a red flag to prevent Flynn’s hiring. He didn’t last long. Flynn was pushed out on February 13, 2017, after The Washington Post revealed he had lied to Vice President Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador about sanctions. Flynn has since admitted, in a guilty plea, that he also lied to FBI agents about those conversations. He is now cooperating with Mueller. These top-level positions join other, lower-ranking officials who are also in legal trouble. George Papadopoulos has also admitted he lied to the FBI about conversations with Russians, and is cooperating with Mueller. Though a former Trump aide dismissed Papadopoulos as a “coffee boy,” Trump praised him by name, and photos show the two of them in a meeting. Carter Page, a volunteer foreign-policy adviser, offered confusing and contradictory information in testimony to Congress, and a memo from House Intelligence Committee Democrats released on Saturday alleges that intelligence gathered by the Justice Department also contradicts Page’s testimony. Outside the scope of the Russia investigation itself, the Democratic memo once again shows the dangers of believing close Trump ally Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes, who has repeatedly been caught making misleading statements, and the Democratic memo rebuts the most controversial claims made in a memo from Republicans on the committee released earlier in February. Elsewhere in the Trump orbit, the last month has revealed the foibles of other members of the administration. Rob Porter, former staff secretary, was forced out after accusations of domestic abuse by both of his ex-wives became public. Porter initially tried to sidestep the allegations by telling a clutch of powerful Washington reporters, during an off-the-record meeting, that one of the women had been injured in an accident. In his attempt to downplay the story, Chief of Staff John Kelly offered a story that other West Wing aides believed was so false they expressed concern to reporters about it. Given his stellar military career, Kelly was granted a presumption of innocence when he joined the White House. That can no longer be justified. In October, he told a pejorative story about Representative Frederica Wilson that turned out not to be true; when video evidence contradicted Kelly, however, he and the White House refused to concede the point. Then on Porter, Kelly said he had acted as soon as he learned of the allegations against him, a claim contradicted by FBI Director Christopher Wray during sworn testimony. The White House press shop also offered contradictory statements about Porter, though it’s hard to tell whether that’s simply because other West Wing officials were misleading them. The communications team has hardly distinguished itself, though, beginning in the first days of the presidency, when it went to war with a false claim about inauguration crowds, then introduced “alternative facts” into the lexicon. Why do so many White House staffers lie? It might come from their boss. As Brian Stelter noted, the president shamelessly changed the meaning of a comment he’d heard on television about the House Intelligence Committee memo, refashioning it into a bludgeon against ranking Democrat Adam Schiff: Holy moly. The @FoxNews anchor said "Congressman Schiff, he ARGUES the REPUBLICAN memo omitted and distorted key facts." Trump just deleted 5 words from the quote to allege the opposite meaning. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/967563946063523840 [ https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/967566191207370753 ] Washington is also filled with Trump appointees who have found themselves facing charges that they are unqualified for the offices they hold, unethical in how they have used them, or both at once. Axios reveals that Trump is considering appointing his personal pilot, John Dunkin, to lead the Federal Aviation Administration. The nugget of news produced an immediate tizzy, as yet another case of Trump trying to select someone close to him without obvious qualification for an important job. The immediate reaction is perhaps unfair to Dunkin, who is little known and may very well be suited to the job. It’s not unfair to Trump, though. One of his senior advisers is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has been given a sweeping portfolio of complex tasks, despite no experience in government; he is working without a permanent security clearance, and reportedly may not receive one until Mueller’s probe is complete because of unknown issues the special counsel is investigating. Another senior adviser is Kushner’s wife, and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who enjoys the trappings of White House work but on Monday said it was inappropriate to ask her about the many accusations of sexual misconduct against the president. To head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Trump chose Ben Carson, who had endorsed Trump for president after ending his own campaign, but had publicly said he was not qualified for the gig. To head HUD’s largest regional office, Trump appointed Lynne Patton, who had no experience in housing but worked for years for the Trump family and spoke at the Republican National Convention. Appointees with more obvious qualifications keep turning out to be flawed in other ways. Trump selected as commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, who retained investments in companies with links to the Kremlin until they were revealed in the document dump known as the Paradise Papers. He appointed another Wall Street billionaire, Carl Icahn, as a senior adviser on regulatory issues, until Icahn precipitously quit after questions from The New Yorker about whether he was using the job to further his own interests. The secretary of health and human services resigned over spending more than $1 million on private and military jets. A government report said Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin had committed “serious derelictions” in spending on a European trip. EPA Administration Scott Pruitt is also under fire for travel spending; the EPA initially said Pruitt had been granted a “blanket waiver” to travel in first class, for safety reasons, only to change its story when pointed to rules that specifically bar such a blanket policy. At the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, interim chief Mick Mulvaney dropped an investigation into a payday lender who had contributed to his campaign. Mulvaney’s spokesman initially said that career staff had recommended dropping the probe, then admitted when pressed by NPR that Mulvaney was involved in the decision. That’s just a sampling. It doesn’t require any further evidence of Trump campaign ties to Russia to grasp the scope of the scandal already in plain sight. Every administration ends up producing examples of corruption and lying, but most presidents take years, and often more than one term, to produce a ledger even half so extensive as what Trump has managed in barely a year in office. It’s an old trope to imagine the how lonely the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who famously walked around with a lamp seeking an honest man, would feel visiting the American capital. In Trump’s Washington, even the hard-bitten cynic might despair. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/diogenes-on-the-potomac/554240/
Trump's legal team has a baffling new argument for why he shouldn't speak with Mueller President Donald Trump's legal team says an in-person interview between the president and special counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia investigation would set a bad precedent for future presidents, and would be a waste of time. Trump's team has been stonewalling Mueller for months, and it looks like the standoff will continue. Experts say that while Trump should be worried about a Mueller interview, his legal team arguing that it would set a bad precedent is a dramatic overstatement. http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-legal-team-has-baffling-argument-for-why-trump-shouldnt-speak-to-mueller-2018-2
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