[willcipriano]

Remember when we all learned from the vault 7 leaks that the US government has the ability to create cyberattacks that appear to investigators to have come from another nation?

We were doing that prior to 2017. Thank God someone like China can't ever do that, even nearly a decade after we did and we can trust these sort of accusations at face value and not at all think critically about them.

[Starman_Jones]

The cyberattacks which used the Marble framework were limited to those where a payload was delivered. Marble is comparable to mailing a bomb and putting a fake return address on the package.

For data exfiltration, which is like robbing a bank vault, you'll need more than a fake address. It's orders of magnitude more difficult to cover your tracks, and you only need to leave one clue behind to undo all that work.

[willcipriano]

You don't think you can smuggle a few terabytes of traffic over the internet undetected?

For the US to have the capability to be aware of that they would have to be engaged in unconstitutional spying on US citizens. A thing they have claimed to have stopped doing.

"Trust us, we are lying"

P.S. this also means the feds have the ability to stop child sexual exploitation that takes place over the internet in its tracks but decided not to.

[Starman_Jones]

I think we're discussing different topics. The article headline says, "Microsoft confirms Russian spies stole source code, accessed internal systems." I interpreted your comment about vault 7 to imply that investigators (ie, MS & anyone that they asked to be involved) couldn't be certain this was Russia. I disagree with that; snuggling data leaves too many breadcrumbs. Your reply seems more focused on other parts of vault 7, and although I don't necessarily disagree with it, I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

However, it's important to remember that FBI!=CIA!=NSA

[willcipriano]

> snuggling data leaves too many breadcrumbs

I can understand these breadcrumbs in detail. From easy stuff like TCP and DNS to the design patterns of the radiation hardened firmware running on the communication satellites.

I propose a blinded trial, give me a API with a few terabytes of data I'll have it accessed and the data moved to a third party. Then Microsoft can tell me who that person is right?

[ipython]

Attributions are about more than the code flow. You also need infrastructure to funnel exfiltrated data back to yourself.

As you can imagine, it’s harder to reuse someone else’s infrastructure. Easy to copy code patterns but you can’t exactly reuse domains, listening posts etc.

[rightbyte]

> Attributions are about more than the code flow. You also need infrastructure to funnel exfiltrated data back to yourself.

How is that even possible and how does it help? A computer is like a state machine where a minuscule amount of states are logged. When the state is gone the trace is gone. And you don't control the other involved computers anyway. And what good does accessing "exfiltrated data" do?

[ipython]

Take this wildly simplified example. You are the attacker. You already have access to internal systems at Microsoft.

Now you need to send the large amounts of data back to yourself, preferably without giving away your own location in the process. That’s the exfiltration phase of the cyber kill chain.

In order to do that, you’ve already established a set of listening posts and command/control sites across the internet. That’s your infrastructure. Setting that up in a pseudo anonymous way is hard, so you don’t do it often and may need to reuse it for multiple targets.

It’s that infrastructure that is hard to replicate if you’re trying to “look like” another threat actor on the Internet.

[rightbyte]

What happens after the first node is hit? You more or less need to control the network stack around it to know were it in turn sends data. If the NSA or whatever do control virtually every network stack they can access politically, every lead will end in countries which does not comply, right?

If there is any world-wide N-to-N statistical analysis of eavesdropped nodes for reentry of the data, it should trivially be able to be defeated by buffering in the nodes.

I don't get how these things can be tracked at all, unless the hackers are quite incompetent.

[ipython]

You’re overstating the technical capabilities at scale and understating just basic investigation techniques.

“Buffering” absolutely happens for a variety of reasons.

Tracking down the money or owning the operations infrastructure of the hosting companies along the way can help. Try to expand past bits on the wire- people set this stuff up at the end of the day.

[rightbyte]

What does scale have to do with it. That is like saying I don't understand, because it is Big Data in the Cloud with Edge Computing. As I see it I just need one computer in Venezuela and the trail is gone.

There is a lot of hand waiving from "security" folks. They are probably about as fraudulent as bullet forensics etc.

[wenebego]

So is there any evidence for it being done by China beside that its been done by the US before?

[willcipriano]

No that's why we all can naively say it isn't happening even though many of us here could do it ourselves as a fun side project.

[Larrikin]

So you just are wildly speculating and assume this one technique you know about completely defeats teams of specialists with the budget of the richest country in the world

It's one thing to point out issues with attribution. It's another to just say since we can't say with 100% certainty let's just make up attributions.

Especially with no knowledge of the attributions certainty, they could be 99.9% sure

[willcipriano]

> we can't say with 100% certainty

This admission is unknown to the general public, they "trust the experts" that it is 100 proven.

> let's just make up attributions.

If you aren't 100% it is Russia and scream Russia, that's what you are doing

[Larrikin]

>If you aren't 100% it is Russia and scream Russia, that's what you are doing

So anything attributing attacks to Russia is made up?

I think you've lost the benefit of the doubt I was giving you. The other reply to my post is probably right, you seem to be purposefully spreading disinformation.

[consumer451]

What OP is doing also happens to look like a disinformation technique.

[wenebego]

Nobody in this thread is saying that but you, atm. I was just wondering if you were speculating or had any evidence. Id even be interested to hear more about your logic because "its possible and has been done before by other actors" isnt enough to convince me

[washadjeffmad]

Are you implying that people are not, in fact, IPs?