[ivan_gammel]

Some attributions of the attack came from private security firms, not from intelligence community. Can their analysis be released or they have ongoing interests too? It would be interesting to know if espionage activities are privatized in USA and "actual humans who will die" work for private corporations.

[probablyexcept]

Private companies like Crowdstrike would probably love to reveal their analysis however they would be restricted by the actual data owners (e.g. the DNC) and I would guess ongoing government investigations. Plus why blow all of your signatures when they still work?

Outside of that, there's tons of data online already regarding Russian government hacking activity: http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2016/06/unit42-ne... https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/global/en/cu... https://securelist.com/blog/research/72924/sofacy-apt-hits-h... http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2016/09/unit42-so...

Do you think understanding the tools, infrastructure, coding styles, activities, targets of these groups allows them to perform attribution?

[ivan_gammel]

I'd say, there should be a report that assembles all this data and makes proper statements on facts that cannot be disclosed. I personally don't have enough time to read and verify all these links to be able to reconstruct the full picture. I just see that some parties report the intrusions (and I agree that it's likely happened); US government publishes some BS as a proof; some parties discuss the impact of Wikileaks publication on elections; some link all this together and build a theory about Trump winning because Russia influenced the elections by publishing dirty stuff of DNC (it's at least not obvious that the actor thought that victory could be achieved by such means and that there existed any intent to alter the result of elections that way).

[stefantalpalaru]

> Do you think understanding the tools, infrastructure, coding styles, activities, targets of these groups allows them to perform attribution?

No. First they ignored all the other intruders on the DNC network because they didn't fit the Russian narrative, then they took a Chinese tool of choice like X-Tunnel and claimed it's some custom Russian tool, then they forgot to tell us that the actual email exfiltration had nothing to do with the internal intruders - it was just phishing, done from the outside.

These private digital forensics companies act more like PR companies, so trusting them with something you can't verify is silly.