Whose “law” is it that the closer you are to an event the more you can see that the reporting on the event is desperately flawed? This has almost always been my own personal experience.
To have the article hit the nail on the head with a entirely plausible attack means one of two things;
1) This is exactly what happened
2) A nation state wanted us to think this is exactly what happened.
Either way the NSA is involved. The people on the ground who knew it happened would have to be NSL’d from telling their superiors that it happened, so they leaked it.
Perhaps the denials from above are entirely sincere because the people who discovered it can’t pass it up the chain.
The only thing I’m having trouble with is that would have required either a low-level plant to have discovered it and someone else at a low-level found out and was sworn to secrecy, or a middle-manager plant intercepted the message as it went up the line.
The alternative, that this is a false flag, is pretty fascinating in its own right. TAO would have had to conceptualize the attack vector, and then someone planted the story.
Perhaps this is equally likely. In fact, this is actually an attack I assume TAO is using in the field, which would burn this attack vector presumably because they have an even better one.
Even more interesting, the idea TAO was actively using this attack vector, saw evidence in the field their attack was discovered (devices going dark) and so preemptively planted a story to blame the opposition before they accused the US of the same thing.