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Comment by jocro | Hacker News Reader

> TIL I'm as good as a state level intelligence team.

Not to totally ignore the pithiness, but I feel like your comment touches on something I see a ton here (and elsewhere): an offhand dismissal of the 'state level' intelligence capacity.

At the end of the day, the systems were exploited. That more sophisticated methods went unused should be a measure of efficiency and not necessarily execution. Why break out the trick play if your opponent can't keep from you running it up the middle?

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True. But the absence of sophistication constitutes evidence neither in favor nor against the "State Actor" hypothesis.

Until a Russian name or IP address is provided, the accusations fail to hold water. An incomplete proof is equivalent to "'cause we said so"

Spoofing ips is absurdly easy.

I agree that IP addresses aren't good evidence but it isn't really possible to spoof TCP in practice.

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/55279/how-easy-i...

If you are targeting a US political entity, using a staging server in Russia probably isn't the worst idea, so unless the IP address directly ties to the Russian government/intelligence services, it's still only weak evidence of Russia's involvement.

>hat more sophisticated methods went unused should be a measure of efficiency and not necessarily execution. Why break out the trick play if your opponent can't keep from you running it up the middle?

I question how efficient it is to get caught red handed in the cookie jar of the worlds only super power.

Sure Vladimir Putin could invite President Obama to a state dinner and then proceed to blow his head off with an AK-47 but that would lack the subterfuge I expect from "state level actors". If this is indeed the Russians, they are as laughably incompetent as our elected officials in regards to infosec and thus a threat to no one.

Publicly assassinating the president of a country is slightly different then pilfering clumsily guarded emails of campaigning politicians. One starts world wars. The other doesn't.

I'd like to believe that it won't.

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