The alleged cyber “hacks” by the Russian state to either disrupt or perhaps tip the recent election raises many questions concerning how such attacks are attributed, and if true, what can be done about it. Evidence concerning the perpetrators is rarely public, owing to the sensitivity of sources and methods, so the public is left with unsatisfactory attribution based on assertions of government intelligence agencies, and, of course, identifying the beneficiaries of the attack. In the case of the hack of Sony Pictures in 2014, the North Korean government clearly benefited politically, so its role was more plausible, but in the case of the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and alleged trolling, the beneficiaries (besides the presidential candidate of the opposing party) are somewhat less clear. The U.S. public has no modern day equivalent of the photos that confirmed the presence of Russian missiles on Cuban soil in 1962, so there is understandable skepticism concerning the attribution of these attacks. Attribution tends to follow parallel paths. One is technical evidence, either in similarity of code or patterns of cyber campaigns, that tends to support attribution to one perpetrator or another. In the case of the election cyber campaign, these attacks are consistent with the Russian state approach to cyber attacks: steal sometimes-embarrassing information and release it and conduct trolling to “shape” public opinion. Thi
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from Breaking News http://ift.tt/2gRslZ3
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