Yesterday on these pages we noted that cyber expert John McAfee cast some serious doubt on the reports that Russia was involved in hacking the U.S. election. He's got some company.
Bloomberg.com has this: U.S. Intelligence Got the Wrong Cyber Bear in which Leonid Bershidsky comes just shy of calling the claims "fake news."
As part of his support of the theory he cites wordfence.com which contains this article, Election Hack Report FAQ: What You Need to Know which contains, among other things, this brief but conclusive summary:
Does the report prove that Russia Hacked the 2016 US Election?
No it does not. What Wordfence revealed on Friday is that the PHP malware sample that the US government provided is:
-An old version of malware. The sample was version 3.1.0 and the current version is 3.1.7 with 4.1.1 beta also available.
-Freely available to anyone who wants it.
-The authors claim they are Ukrainian, not Russian.
-The malware is an administrative tool used by hackers to upload files, view files on a hacked website, download database contents and so on. It is used as one step in a series of steps that would occur during an attack.
Wordfence also analyzed the IP addresses available and demonstrated that they are in 61 countries, belong to over 380 organizations and many of those organizations are well known website hosting providers from where many attacks originate. There is nothing in the IP data that points to Russia specifically.
In other words, it could have been the Russians. Or maybe not. The available evidence is inconclusive.
BTW, does anyone notice the similarity between the claims about intelligence agency consensus in the hacking case and claims of scientific community consensus on global warming? If the msm had been more responsible during the 2016 campaign and the warnings about global warning their customers might be less suspicious of their reports.
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