On Thursday, the Department of homeland security and FBI issued a joint report on Russian cyber-attacks under the name Grizzly Steppe. It was expected that the report will display additional details regarding the statements of the intelligence community about the direct link between the Russian government and hacker hacks computers of the National Committee of the Democratic party and other organizations. However, security experts expressed serious disappointment in the contents of the report.
The author of the book Inside Cyber Warfare (Cyberwar inside) Jeffrey Carr (Jeffrey Carr) wrote on Friday that the report “adds nothing to the evidence of the involvement of the Russian state” to hacker attacks during the election campaign. A former air force officer and a specialist in cyber operations Robert Lee (Robert Lee), working for the New America, says that for professionals from the security sector benefit from a little report due to the fact that he was poorly prepared, and it lacks important details.
According to Carr, the report lists the hacker group, previously suspected of having links to the Russian government (mostly commercial security company), “but not presented any evidence to support the existence of such communication.” Perhaps the proof are still classified; but if so, said Carr, they had to consider an independent Commission because the White house attacks on Russia “increasingly resemble a domestic political operation, organized by the administration.”
Whether with less skepticism applies to the White house, calling the accusations against the Russian state “strong and accurate”. However, he stressed that the report Grizzly Steppe there is a lot of negligence and error, and the data from it are of little practical use. In a list of names of hacking campaigns such as APT28 and COZYBEAR, inexplicably included the names of malicious programs and codes. In the data, which should help network administrators to block attacks, missing important IP addresses and schedules of break-ins.
According to Lee, describes the methods of work of the hacker groups of the same type and lacks specificity, therefore benefit from the report to protect the networks very little. He comes to the conclusion that Grizzly Steppe was prepared “in a hurry”, and also believes that all useful data has been removed from it at the stage of analysis and negotiation.
Because of deficiencies in the report Grizzly Steppe is food for doubt can obtain critics of the White house and those who do not believe in the involvement of Russian hackers, first of all, the President-elect Donald trump. He and his supporters in the accusations against Russia, I see mostly an attempt by President Obama and his democratic allies to discredit the new President. But the political concern due to the lack of evidence of increases in other circles. On Friday, the left-wing commentator Matt Taibbi (Matt Taibbi) said about the report, Grizzly Steppe that “there’s a lot of jargon, but few specifics”. According to him, the state once again showed “the ability to show their product”, by resorting to exaggerations.
