While the mainstream media waste time on Hillary Clinton’s faux email scandal, it seems they should be more concerned about Donald Trump’s interaction with Russia. His Russia communicating server should give us pause.
Donald Trump instinct to defend Russia perplexing and the server?
A group of computer scientists set out to determine if hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign and they stumbled upon a Trump / Russia server link. Franklin Foer’s piece titled “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?” reveals a disturbing discovery.
In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue. …
The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. “I’ve never seen a server set up like that,” says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. “It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.” The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump.
The article pointed out the following.
- The Trump server did not allow any IPs to connect to it. The fact that the Russian IP was allowed increases the probability that their communication was intentional.
- Activity level on the server tracked the intensity of the 2016 presidential campaign.
- The scientists tried to get traction for their story including placing it on Reddit in September.
- The New York Times was following the same story around the same time.
- After The New York Times had contacted the Alfa Bank, the owner of the server in Russia, the Trump domain stopped working. Four days later, a new Trump server name appeared. The Russian server once again communicated with the new server name. But the communication stopped cold as media made inquiries.
- Alfa Bank denied that they had any relationship with Donald Trump.
Interestingly, the New York Times ran a story tonight, the same day Slate released its analysis, titled “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” A disconcerting couple of paragraphs appeared in the middle of the piece. It reads as follows.
In classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump. They focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin.
F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 “look-up” messages — a first step for one system’s computers to talk to another — to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.
Did the FBI contact the scientists to exchange ideas on their findings? Are they playing possum to see if more gets revealed? We likely will not know soon.
Our media coverage on so much is lazy and thoughtless. Stories like these require some thinking. Many Trump scandals get little media attention specifically because they do not lend themselves to the standard sound bites.
The media disrespect the intelligence of the American people. We all must be the media as the standard bearers failed us. So remember to share and encourage those in your sphere to read and share. As President Obama once said, ‘We are the change we were looking for.”