The Spy Who Added Me on LinkedIn

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/the-spy-who-added-me-on-linkedin

by arcanus • 10 years ago

148 42 10 years ago

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

Blatantly off topic from the article but related to social network spies, and because this community takes privacy concerns seriously — anyone who joins your neighborhood on Nextdoor can immediately see your full address (apartment number included) with the default privacy settings. Also, it's possible to join a neighborhood with no verification if just one bad actor is in it and invites you. I think it's an absolutely absurd setting. I've clicked through many people in my neighborhood and get the feeling most people don't realize the exposure at all.

gumby• 10 years ago

Thanks, I had not realized that! Fortunately I registered under a fake address, but still, didn't want that published either.

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

Exactly the same case for myself. It was up for over a year before I realized too.

acqq• 10 years ago

Has anybody managed to extract what was actually "spy" worthy that the guy did?

"Asked people for information" isn't saying anything. What do I miss? What were the secrets?

foota• 10 years ago

Sounds like they were particularly after information private to businesses, since that is a large part of American interests.

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

On May 24, 2016, Buryakov was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and he now resides in the federal low-security prison in rural Lisbon, Ohio.

Sentenced to just 30 months in a low-security prison... must not have been too severe.

gragas3• 10 years ago

The article said he was charged with being an "unregistered foreign agent".

secfirstmd4• 10 years ago

Anyone else feel that if the Russians really wanted to influence the election, the actual methodologies used and people targeted were not that impressive or well thought through? I mean it was hardly Stuxnet.

If your wanna change an election why not hack a wider range of targets? I know that "Who gains most?" is one of the best ways to attribute blame in the intelligence world but I have not (like the North Korea / Sony hack) seen evidence that even nearly proves it was a hack directed by the Russian Government. Possibly a malicious sympathiser but hardly state level techniques...

Also, how slow and useless are the NSA that they weren't watching to protect senior people in one of the two major parties in the country? If so many intelligence folks are as sure as they claim to be that it's the Russians, where is the counter-response? You mean to tell me that the TAO can't do better then some leaks about Russian businessmen close to Putin - obviously that is one of his weak points but he doesn't care about that right now. I get that they don't want to reveal warfighting capabilities but seriously - if you think it's really the Russians, throw a shoulder...

drawnwren• 10 years ago

Especially given the pre-election polling predictions, I have to think the risk vs reward would've been very low for Russia. Trump may not want to think of them as the enemy, but even an 'anti-Russian' administration allowed them to march into Crimea and bomb Syria uncontested.

secfirstmd4• 10 years ago

Yeah, plus I think while Trump (can't believe I'm saying anything positive about the guy) might actually be good for resetting relations with Russia, might reduce their paranoia etc - Russians tend to prefer opponents/friends who have predictable stability, and he certainly is not that. I feel a sensible Russian policy would have preferred the devil-we-know of Clinton.

I have nothing but disgust for Putin and his henchmen but at the same time I think there is a lot of value in reading/watching his full speeches directly. There is a lot of poor reporting these days in our Western media and it easier to make better predictions about his frame of mind by seeing exactly what he is saying - then monitor his actions. Many of the direct translations of his speeches about Trump are different from what has been reported. The Russians feel surrounded (by NATO expansion), by NATO intrusions of jets, submarines, Ukraine government change and they also feel humiliated from the 90s, Kosovo, Iraq etc etc. It's important that more people make a real effort to understand and internalise that understanding of Russian fears if we are to avoid a full on renewal of the Cold War...I severely doubt the Trump Administration has people who will be happy to walk back and reset things.

lisivka2• 10 years ago

Why you think Trump is pro-Russian? Republicans are anti-Russian, AFAIK.

edblarney• 10 years ago

"why not hack a wider range of targets?"

They need to have 'plausible deniability' so it's hard to do without fully leaving your tracks and showing your hand.

secfirstmd4• 10 years ago

But let's red-team it for a second and think about who you would go after if you were Russian and wanted to hand the election to Trump. There's a lot more people on that list worth going after than the folks that "Guccifer" did manage to get a hold of.

s_q_b• 10 years ago

This is PSYOPS not OCO.

Russia's goal was to create the perception that they're meddling in this election, so as to delegitimize the electoral process itself.

rdtsc3• 10 years ago

Blame the Russians is probably too convenient to not be used. It is a useful PR story because it has multiple benefits - it deflects blame "don't read the emails, worry about the Russians hiding in the bushes ready to attack instead", and it takes a jab at Putin. Him and Hillary specifically, are not very good friends. They've battled over on Syria ("I'll set a No Fly zone there!"), but goes back probably as far as Bill Clinton involvement in the Balkan Wars. Of course also by Hillary severely criticizing his own rigging of his election.

During the debates, along all the other entertaining stuff I saw (from both sides), I remember Hillary mentioning how not less than 17 intelligence agencies checked and told her it was the Russians. If you listen to the news, that's how you know something is a lie - they overemphasize stuff. If she is saying Coast Guard Intelligence went out of their way to investigate and tell her the Russians did it, you know it is probably time to stop worrying about Russians and worry about other stuff. (Another example, Cuomo from CNN said "it is illegal to read these documents, you have to come to use for interpretation", I knew, those documents have to be read, probably paying close attention...)

Looking at it from technical aspect, I would imagine any state actor who is not stupid, probably managed to hack into that server. Russians are good but they don't somehow have magic others don't have.

jontayesp• 10 years ago

The point Hillary made was there was a consensus among the 17 agencies. A join statement was made representing these agencies: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-departme...

grrowl• 10 years ago

"Russia" is a much better explanation than "we're not sure who hacked us, we have many enemies and terrible OPSEC"

dx034• 10 years ago

How do you know that the election wasn't decided by foreign intelligence? A good hack is one that no one notices. Creating a black out on election day wouldn't change the outcome. Leaks and planted stories could.

This fast drifts into conspiracy theories, but it seems that the outcome of the election was at least partly determined by stories floating around on Facebook.

Not saying that any of this was influenced by the Russian government (I don't think so). But there is certainly not enough information to judge what they did or if it was effective.

hash-set• 10 years ago

How do you know it wasn't done by US intelligence? You don't. My guess is the best leaks came from people inside the US govt. who couldn't stomach the Clintons back in power.

JohnStrange• 10 years ago

What are you talking about? The methods worked perfectly well.

rdtsc3• 10 years ago

This is a good story, well written. I remember the previous case with the sleeper agents. The one theme I see is waste. Seems like such a wasteful way to do things -- spend decades planning and setting everything up and then they go and just ask companies for random info. Or during the Soviet times I like how they sent this spy to acquire info on the Space Shuttle, so he went to a public library and photo-copied stuff from there. Years of training and all that setup to go and press the "copy" button in a library.

The timing of the story is not a coincidence I am guessing. They mentioned the "election" so I am assuming it is playing along with the Russians have rigged the election and KGB agents are everywhere. And that's why Clinton's campaign resulted in worse Democratic election performance in 28 years. I don't know about anyone else, I but I am getting a little tired of blaming the Russians for everything. Wonder if editors would agree that we should be a lot stricter with our immigration policy and vet people better before letting them come in...

thewhitetulip3• 10 years ago

years of training and all they do is press the copy button

:-D that is a funny take at their life. they do have to live in "enemy" territory as a double life, living that itself would account their intensive training!

spoiler• 10 years ago

I'm missing something, but what would be so difficult about living in enemy territory? I don't believe anyone in their daily interaction was hostile to them (apart from exceptions who would be hostile to anyone).

vostok2• 10 years ago

My favorite part of this is that rewards for spying seems to be a $3k per month house in the Bronx. Sounds like you're better off working for Facebook.

gragas3• 10 years ago

I don't think most spies are in it for the money. I can pretty much guarantee that FBI/CIA/NSA salaries are all lower than those of the top tech companies.

vostok2• 10 years ago

I would really like to see some hard numbers. I know the salaries are public, but I wonder if there are bonuses that aren't included and benefits such as housing/car/food/etc. I'm sure some are contractors rather than employees. I wonder how much they make.

thewhitetulip3• 10 years ago

I started reading the article, in the middle it said "this is how they linked the DNC hacking to Russians" and I finished the article and there was no revelation at all, did I read it incorrectly? Or is the article misleading?

madaxe_again• 10 years ago

I'm raising an eyebrow at the existence of the article, to be honest - I'm not proposing that suppression of information would be a good thing, rather that perhaps this is being published with a purpose.

There was a case earlier this year involving a pair of brits caught red handed spying in Russia - it made international news for a day, and that was it. Both were repatriated, and the matter didn't go any further in the public eye.

So - what I'm getting at - Russia declined a deal, and this lengthy exposé going into methods and so-forth is the fallout. In the instance earlier this year, Britain and Russia evidently played ball.

So, while it's perfectly valid journalism, I think there's also a bit of "throw 'em to the lions".

rms_returns• 10 years ago

Anyone watched the movie, Salt?

salimmadjd• 10 years ago

Written by Howard Dean's former staffer [1].

This article smells like DNC propaganda. Firstly, this is an old story. The heart of the news is about 2 years old [2] and it's Graff's first article for bloomberg [3] though he has been writing for Wire and Politico (his former paper)

Secondly, the author is exploring political career of his own in Vermont [4] and it's very possible his Politico article (that changed the blame to lack of technology skills by Hillary) [5] and this article are meant to curry favor for DNC players as he is making his own political bids.

Lastly, the author makes conclusion the hacks were done by Russians, perhaps one of the greatest foreign operations in decades, has undoubtedly been Russia’s successful effort to influence this fall’s presidential election through hacking however as others pointed out there is no clear evidence of this.

Overall, this shows the sophisticated state of political propaganda in US and how it operates to shape the minds of the readers. We're in for a bumpy ride.

(edited for formatting)

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/gagraff

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/315343d2-a59d-11e4-ad35-00144feab...

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ATEO_DMrDvA/garrett-m-graff

[4] http://m.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2015/11/06/garr...

[5] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clint...

The Spy Who Added Me on LinkedIn

Related Stories