Monday, January 2, 2017

Security experts call Russia hacking report “poorly done,” “fatally flawed”



On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI released a joint report about Russian cyberattacks, titled “Grizzly Steppe.” The report had been expected to lay out more details about intelligence agency’s claims that the Russian government was directly linked to hacks on the DNC and other organizations, but security experts have expressed broad disappointment with the report.

Jeffrey Carr, author of Inside Cyber Warfare, wrote on Friday that the report “adds nothing to the call for evidence that the Russian government was responsible” for the campaign hacks. Robert Lee, a former Air Force cyberwarfare officer and cybersecurity fellow at New America, argues that the report is of limited use to security professionals, in part because of poor organization and lack of crucial details....

The report, (Jeffrey Carr, author of Inside Cyber Warfare) says, lists hacking groups previously suspected of Russian government ties, mostly identified by commercial security firms, “without providing any supporting evidence that such a connection exists.” That evidence may still remain classified, but Carr says that if so, it should be reviewed by an independent commission, because the White House targeting of Russia “is looking more and more like a domestic political operation run by the White House”....

...political anxiety over the lack of evidence is simmering elsewhere, too. Writing on Friday, left-wing commentator Matt Taibbi described the Grizzly Steppe report as “long on jargon but short on specifics,” and part of a broader pattern of government overstatement with “an element of salesmanship.”

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