Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?

[Loki Liesmith]

Source: Slate

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.

Read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html

---

TIC TIC TIC TIC...

[SunSeeker]

1. Wow.

[Egnever]

29. If this part of the story is true I don't buy that

Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”

[CRH]

32. Agree, random revisit does not seem possible, ...

even to the most respected sources for this article and the industry. How much more authoritative can you find than Vixie?

It is indeed as close to a smoking gun as you will ever find in the electronic communication world of the internet. It would be solid evidence for any reasonable, person. It is like a criminal case that is all circumstantial, with no DNA, weapon, or forensics.

This article is very well researched and written, and takes the evidence or Trump involvement with Russian oligarchs, and a trail of dots to the Russian government and Putin to the very edge of certainty. Are the circumstances obvious, yes, is there possible motive, certainly, but is this proof absolutely, unfortunately not. In a civil case this preponderance of evidence would be conclusive, in a criminal case twelve jurors would have to agree the circumstantial evidence was over whelming though unsupported by that 'smoking gun'. Good luck selecting the jury than would not end up hung, every time.

Probably best summed by the final paragraph of the article:

What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump adviser whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.

We don’t yet know what this server was for, but it deserves further explanation.

[SunSeeker]

33. Uh no. Fuck FBI anonymous right wing sources. The facts say otherwise.

The activity does NOT resemble spam. Read the article.


And the FBI has not officially said anything about this, applying a double standard about what they will comment on close to an election. Fuck that.


So you trust anonymous right wing FBI sources over the facts?

[canetoad]

5. And Alfa Bank

Has offices in:
Russia
United Kingdom
The Netherlands
Ukraine
Belarus
Kazakhstan

http://alfabank.com/

It's run by three Russian oligarchs:
Mikhail Fridman
Pyotr Aven
German Khan (a Ukranian)

Edit: On googling Alfa Bank +trump, this article from September:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/the-mystery-of-trumps-man-in-moscow-214283

[unc70]

8. Very interesting article

Long, but interesting.

[OKNancy]

7. This is long and hard to understand for some. I asked someone on twitter to explain

in plain language.

Here is what he wrote:

Robert B ?@Whyaduck
Essentially, there was human-generated email between a Trump owned computer and a computer owned by a Russian bank.

They don't have the emails, just evidence of activity, direct between the Trump Org and Russian bank.

Activity spiked during political activity (RNC, DNC, etc.).

They were configured to reject email from other sources. When Trump's org was tipped off, their server disappeared.

[ms liberty]

10. Wow. The plain language version does simplify it and

as far as i can understand and it sounds quite damning. It is appalling that this is not major news.

[OKNancy]

11. right. I think this is actually the smoking gun of today's news

but it's so difficult to wade through, it might get lost.

[Egnever]

30. Yes I think this is over most peoples heads. It absolutely might get lost.

This is the portion of that story that brings this home for me

Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”

If the portion I bolded is true then that is a pretty big smoking gun.

Think of that like this..You get a new unpublished phone number and the first call you get on the new number is from the same bank that was ringing your old phone number.

The idea that happened by chance would defy belief. Unless you gave the bank that number...

[RKP5637]

12. Nothing will likely come of it. M$M is only focused on taking down Hillary. n/t

[anamandujano]

19. "When Trump's org was tipped off, their server disappeared."~~~~~~~Comey tip?

[ffr]

9. Well that's certainly strange. Perhaps a little sniffing and port scanning perhaps?

Donald's E-mail servers apparently ran and are still running Microsoft IIS v6 and Server 2003, which are no longer supported with patches and fixes from Microsoft. I wonder if that would be a security problem on the Internet. Hmmm.

Donald Trump's Email Servers Are Very Unsecure


While the email practices of the Democrats and the Clinton camp are grabbing all the headlines recently, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has some cringeworthy email practices of his own.
<snip>

Beaumont dug into the public records to find that the email servers use Microsoft Windows 2003 alongside old server management software from Microsoft called Internet Information Server 6. He also found that the servers are accessible on the public Internet via Outlook Web Access, do not employ two-factor authentication (which requires a secondary login code), have no mobile device management option, and do not receive security patches. - Fortune

[pennylane100]

14. The photo of that dirty old man

holding that sweet innocent little angel makes me want to puke. He is beyond disgusting and because he is going to court accused of sex with a minor, he should not be allowed anywhere around children.

[OKNancy]

13. This has blown up on twitter in the last 30 minutes

It may get some traction

[Xipe Totec]

15. It's the other way around; A Putin server was communicating with Russia - Trump nt

[pnwmom]

16. What do you think about a possible connection to this Politico story?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512565213

[Coyotl]

20. Donald Trump, delete your server.

Oh yeah, already did that once, right after getting caught.

Oh the irony! This brings new meaning to revenge of the nerds.

[TomCADem]

22. How Would Server Traffic Involving Facetime/Skype Look?

Let's say you do not want to text or e-mail. Also, you do not want to use a phone for fear that it might be tapped. How would you communicate with Russia perhaps in real time without creating static record of such discussions?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

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. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. “I get more mail in a day than the server handled,” Davis says.

* * *
Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.

[BadgerKid]

28. there's constant mal-pinging on the net,

attempting to find if a computer is there and what services are running on it in an effort to locate a vulnerability.

[SunSeeker]

34. This was not random. Read the article. nt

[pressbox69]

30. We...

are all under Putin's heel now.

[triron]

31. knr

[dooner]

32. This topic seems very relevant

right about now.

Slate article was also updated November 2.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/the_trump_server_evaluating_new_evidence_and_countertheories.html

[Coyotl]

35. FBI has FISA warrant for Trump secret server connected to Russia.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512604434