CyberWire Daily - Election hacking, influence operations, and official reports. EU hacking concerns. Lawsuit over email's invention. Twitter frowns on unrequited love. Billy Bass, meet Alexa.  

Episode Date: January 9, 2017

In today's podcast we hear about the report on Russian election hacking and influence operations the US Director of National Intelligence released Friday. Election hacking? Not really, but influence operations? You bet. Robert M. Lee from Dragos Security weighs in on the report. European authorities worry about Russia inserting itself into 2017 elections. Law, and order, torts and Twitter. Emily Wilson from Terbium Labs describes the role of law enforcement on the Dark Web. And a note on she-who-must-not-be-named (our listeners in San Diego will know exactly whom we mean—heck, it's Alexa). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The U.S. intelligence community releases its report on Russian election hacking and influence operations. Election hacking, not really, but influence operations, you betcha. European Thank you. I'm Dave Bittner in Baltimore with your Cyber Wire summary for Monday, January 9, 2017. The U.S. intelligence community on Friday released its promised report on Russian election hacking. The report had been expected sometime this week, but it was issued soon after the president-elect was briefed on its contents. this week, but it was issued soon after the president-elect was briefed on its contents. The work of the CIA, FBI, and NSA, the report, as expected, is longer on conclusions than it is on evidence, evidence usually being more sensitive than conclusions, because it's likelier to reveal sources and methods. These conclusions are that the Russian government sought to influence the U.S. presidential election, with a goal of ensuring that either major candidate would wind up either compromised, indebted, or damaged.

The analysis holds that President-elect Trump was the Russians' preferred candidate, although their efforts were for some time premised on the assessment that former Secretary of State Clinton would be the eventual winner. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will begin an investigation tomorrow. Initial reactions range from outrage against Russia's activities to skepticism concerning evidence in the analysis. The analysis is brief and worth reading. Two mild surprises. Part of the Russian motivation seems to have been retaliation for embarrassment by the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the UK's GCHQ may have tipped US intelligence off to some Russian activity.

Something that's not surprising, RT is basically a Russian government mouthpiece. Lots of people have been shocked, shocked at this, but where have they been? Our staff reads RT with pleasure, but they understand what they're getting. The European Commission and the French government are taking a perceived Russian threat to 2017 elections seriously, looking to shore up defenses. Presumably those defenses will include a counter-narrative to expected influence operations. U.S. officials are mulling their options in this respect as well. We checked in with Robert M. Lee, CEO of the industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos Incorporated,

for his reaction to the declassified report. So they intended to understand, did Russia attempt to influence the election? Did this originate from Putin? And what was his motivation, if so? But they said right up front, our intention is not to understand if there were manipulations of votes,

if it actually resulted in an impact that changed the election, or any of those other hot topic items that were, by their very nature, very political. And that, to me, was probably the best thing they could start off with, to note that the intelligence community is apolitical. They are not in favor of any party and have served under many parties.

So it is just about intelligence assessments itself. The piece that probably gave some folks confusion, I think there was probably two things in there was the fact that when there was an assessment by the FBI, the NSA and the CIA, it was a difference in their assessment confidence levels. The CIA and FBI came out with a high confidence assessment, whereas the NSA came out with a moderate confidence assessment. But there's an important clarification there to understand. Number one, they were talking about the motivation ascribed to the Russian state. There was no difference amongst anybody involved in this in the fact that Russia attempted to influence the election. The confidence ratings was around why Putin attempted to do this. Now, the second thing to know about that is the CIA and NSA and

FBI obviously focus on very different data sets, where NSA is intercepting communications and CIA would have human contacts and be much more close to these type of discussions. But the single most important thing about these difference in confidence levels is when I saw this, saw this that made me very, very excited to see the difference because it showed this independence of thought process between the CIA and NSA and that there wasn't this political agenda. There wasn't this attempt to try to calm the public. If you were writing this report for the purpose of just convincing the public of an argument, you would have a combined front, very, very simply. But the fact that they actually had a rigorous approach to this, exactly like you would expect any other intelligence report, and had an independent judgment and independent thought,

just really made me proud of the intelligence community, actually. Is it unusual to see this kind of unanimous agreement in a joint report like this? unanimous agreement in a joint report like this? Absolutely. I think it's fair to say that there is some interagency rivalry. And for the NSA and CIA to really agree on anything is pretty outstanding. You know, these are very, very sort of strongwilled groups that are arguing with each other. But the competitive nature between the two ensures that the intelligence that gets to the president is as best as it can be. So for them to come out and have the same assessment and have a moderate to high-level confidence on even things such as motive is pretty significant. to high-level confidence on even things such as motive, it is pretty significant. The last thing I would say about the document is we will undoubtedly see folks that come out and say, look, this isn't convincing.

And to that effect, I would say that the intelligence community really isn't in the business of convincing the American public of anything, especially when it comes to this debate, which has been very, very emotional for folks. And I don't know what evidence there would be or what smoking gun there even could be that would actually turn people's minds or change their opinions. Instead, they just held their ground and said, you know what, we're not going to burn a bunch of tradecraft. We're not going to burn a bunch of sensitive sources to try to make an argument to potentially an audience that may not really want to listen in any ways because of the

political situation. So we're just going to come out and be professionals and make our assessment and sort of take it or leave it. I think it was a very, very appropriate way to handle it. That's Robert M. Lee from Dragos Security. In other news, it's not all Russian cyber attacks. The Baltic News Agency, which reports on Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, sustained a denial-of-service attack late Friday, which, come to think of it, might be a Russian cyber attack after all. Vlad, anything to say?

The Dragon OK APT group linked to China's PLA is said to be newly active against Tibetan and Russian targets. A couple of bits of legal or quasi-legal news. This guy who says he invented email is suing TechDirt for saying no, he didn't invent email. The suit may be worth watching if only because the plaintiff's attorney is the guy who represented Hulk Hogan against Gawker. watching if only because the plaintiff's attorney is the guy who represented Hulk Hogan against Gawker. Finally, we've been following some horrifying IoT Frankensteins. Most disturbingly, the Rhode Island School of Design slaving of Billy the Big Mouth Bass to Amazon's Alexa smart home system.

There's more. Mattel has announced Aristotle, a voice-activated hub for a children's smart room. It's based on Microsoft Cognitive Services and secured by Qualcomm and Silk Labs. So far, so good. We just hope Aristotle's peripatetic ways don't take him down the sad path trodden by Tay. It shouldn't. Aristotle ought to be old enough to know better. But there's more, and henceforth we're going to refer to Alexa as She Who Must Not Be Named, for reasons that will immediately be clear. A San Diego TV news program was covering a cute

kids-do-the-darnedest-things human interest story about a little girl who made a wish to She Who Must Not Be Named, answered to the parents' discomfiture by Amazon's delivery of a Sparkle Mansion dollhouse and one hundredth of a hacker weight of sugar cookies. The new anchor gushed about the cuteness, saying, I love the little girl, saying, she who must not be named, order me a dollhouse. Sure enough, dollhouses were soon ordered throughout the viewing area. Did we mention that Echo enables Amazon ordering by default? We didn't know that

either. So in case she who must not be named is listening, this podcast is not ordering Sparkle Mansions, Care Bears, My Little Ponies, or any zombie-themed toys. We're a family show, but come on, there are limits. our GRC programs, we rely on point-in-time checks. But get this, more than 8,000 companies like Atlassian and Quora have continuous visibility into their controls with Vanta. Here's the gist. Vanta brings automation to evidence collection across 30 frameworks, like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. They also centralize key workflows like policies, access reviews, and reporting and helps you get security questionnaires done

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Joining me once again is Emily Wilson. She's the Director of Analysis for Terbium Labs. Emily, we talk about the dark web, you and I, and I'm curious, you know, what is law enforcement's relationship to this community? What's the expectation for people online that law enforcement is lurking around or keeping an eye on things? There's definitely an expectation that law enforcement will be around and will be watching. I think especially when you're dealing with something that's a little bit more high profile, you know, we saw many of the major markets pull weapons from their listings after kind of the terrorist attacks last fall, for example, both kind of in reaction to kind of the horrific acts and also wanting to reduce, you know, the likelihood of law enforcement digging into these marketplaces. But yeah, people definitely expect law enforcement to be around.

You know, I think especially when you get a really obvious question in a forum, people are quick to spot the Fed, as it were. How much has this changed people's behavior, this notion that someone's watching? People are definitely a little bit more sensitive, I think, especially for more seasoned users to avoid giving away too much information. I think this is both personal information, you know, you don't want to say too much about yourself or your home life or your location or your occupation. And I think also, you know, when you're dealing with something like, you know, people discussing, you know, where they might have a source of stolen cards or reviewing a drug purchase, you want to make sure that you can avoid giving away too much information

that might help law enforcement. You know, so you may, for example, say the stealth was fantastic on this packaging. It took me 20 minutes to find the pills, but I'm not going to go into more detail because law enforcement may be watching. And what happens? Are there occasions where, you know, there's a major bust and something goes down, someone gets busted and the community reacts to that? Yeah, definitely. You know, I think especially when you see stories in the news about someone being caught with an inordinate amount of drugs or people with, you know, a huge number of credit cards in their possession or, you know, someone who has, you know, 5,500 social security numbers at their house in Florida, you know, people are quick to say, well, clearly they were on the dark web. The community finds it funny. They like to laugh at it because

of the absurdity of someone who clearly wasn't managing things well. There are, of course, also more serious takedowns. People are concerned, you know, major busts, kind of big vendors who have retired and then have been outed in kind of an investigation. So it's really a cat and mouse game where, you know, you may not even know that law enforcement is shutting things down or putting a stop to things. Yeah. And I think, you know, for every, you know, I made the joke earlier, the spot the Fed, for every obvious question that you see, there are also so many people who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, you know, for years on end to help put an end to some of these, you know,

things that do happen on the dark web. Exploitation, for example, the big shutdowns we've seen in the recent years of some of these sites. And the community is equally happy to see those kinds of horrific acts being stopped. Emily Wilson, thanks for joining us. And now a message from Black Cloak. And now, a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cybercriminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home? Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform

secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home, your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached. Protect your executives and their families 24-7, 365, with Black Cloak. Learn more at blackcloak.io. And that's The Cyber Wire. We are proudly produced in Maryland by our talented team of editors and producers.

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