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Chapter 1: What role did Russian hackers play in the 2016 US presidential race?
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Donald Trump is gaining ground in the 2016 presidential race. But what does his rise mean for Russian hackers desperate to take down Hillary Clinton? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And this is the second part of our series looking at Russia interfering in the US 2016 election.
Chapter 2: How did Vladimir Putin view the West and information warfare?
Last time, David, we looked at this concept of the active measure, something which goes back to KGB days. Or before.
Before, remember, you edited out my deep historical context, Gordon.
Let's just say it goes back a long way.
We're 20 seconds into the episode.
Chapter 3: What is the 'hack and leak' strategy used by Russian intelligence?
I'm already angry again about your vicious editing.
It's about the active measure, back to the story, is the desire to influence, to undermine, often using information as a weapon. And last time we looked at how under Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader came to view the West as weaponizing information against him, and he's determined to use his own methods to fight back.
And one of these methods, David, will be something which is known as hack and leak.
Well, that's right, Gordon.
Chapter 4: Who are the key players in the Russian hacking operations?
Last time we looked at how often very real documents and fake material can be kind of swizzled together and then pushed at journalists who are always, Gordon, of course, as you know, just keen to report whatever comes into their hands. Right. Subject to manipulation by malicious spies, you mean? That's right.
But you seed that information, you take real things and you take some fake stuff and you mix it together and then you seed it to an unsuspecting or sort of gullible journalist as the KGB did throughout the Cold War. And we talked about Operation Denver, where the KGB promulgated the falsehood that the CIA was behind the creation of the AIDS virus.
And it took years after that story had been planted to really get out and spread. And we're going to see that as we approach 2016, some of these old methods of stealing information and then leaking it out will Well, they're still here, but it's going to be a lot easier to get it out. It's gonna be a lot quicker to get the message out thanks to the internet.
And this is going to be called a hack and leak. The hack is of course how you get the stuff and then the leak is how you disseminate it. And this piece of the active measure in 2016 is going to be led by the GRU.
the main directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Gordon, also known as Russian Military Intelligence, and I would say one of the more insane spy organizations operating today in the world.
That's right, the GRU, or it's technically known as the GU these days, but everyone still seems to call it the GRU. Deep roots, going back many decades, unlike some of the other Soviet spy services, the KGB, which... get renamed and the KGB becomes the FSB domestically in the security service and the SVR becomes the foreign bid of the KGB, which is your classic spy service like CIA or MI6.
The GRU are the tough guys of military intelligence. They are doing classic espionage, trying to get military secrets. But they also are engaged in things like sabotage, assassination, active measures in terms of information warfare.
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Chapter 5: What tactics did the GRU employ during the 2016 election?
Again, with this continuity, never disbanded from the days of the Soviet Union and then continuing. And they are the ones who can do some of the most aggressive operations against the West. You think about the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Britain in 2018 with Novichok. a former GRU officer himself, but poisoned by the GRU.
So they tend to have more military targets, but they are, I think you're right, maybe one of the more sinister Russian intelligence services.
I would say exhibit A in the GRU's sinisterness is the seal of the GRU, which you can see. There's a great picture that I've put into the notes here. I don't know if we could put it up somewhere on the video, but it shows... President Putin on a visit to GRU headquarters at a building known as the Aquarium, walking across the seal of the GRU in the Bait Lobby.
Chapter 6: How did the GRU infiltrate the Democratic National Committee?
And the seal is a sinister looking black bat that is covering most of the globe. And it reminds me, Gordon, of the Mitchell and Webb sketch where they're wearing the Death's Head Skull SS uniforms and wondering if they're the baddies. You have to wonder what the GRU guys...
think they're doing at an organization that has an evil looking black bat with its wings covering the entire world very impressive knowledge of british humor by the way to cite mitchell and webb david a very we'll get into number wang next time maybe if you don't know that but
Well, people who listened to our last series will know that I sampled Monster Munch for the first time whilst I was in London, Gordon, and it's gone to the brain. What can I say? Let's go back to the GRU.
So, Wild Place, you mentioned the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the GRU behind the initial invasion of Crimea, parcel bombings across Europe, the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, a campaign to provide money to Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan.
going after foreign forces, a failed coup attempt in Montenegro in 2016, trying to topple the government of Montenegro, poisoning a Bulgarian arms dealer, among many other insane operations.
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Chapter 7: What were the consequences of the GRU's cyber operations on the election?
So I think it's safe to say, Gordon, that the GRU alone might keep our podcast in business for a very long time.
Plenty of stories there. And one of the things they do is a lot of hacking. This episode is sponsored by HP. Most people are not counter-espionage experts, but that won't stop them getting targeted by cyber criminals seeking to extract their secrets.
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I mean, the first case I know of is in the 1980s when the KGB hired some East German teenagers to hack into the early US research internet. By the 1990s, Russian hackers are running a campaign called Moonlight Maze, which is the first real state-backed espionage campaign the US sees against its secrets.
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Chapter 8: What can we learn from the Russian interference in US elections?
All of this is espionage though. And I think it's important that we draw this distinction between different types of behavior, including in cyberspace. Classic espionage is stealing secrets. And that's what a lot of people thought cyber hacking was all about when it came to state intelligence agencies. They thought it was about
Hackers often working for the state or employed by the state, covertly breaking into maybe military research networks, maybe defence networks, stealing the secrets, doing what spies have always done. But it is also worth saying that there is an element which is going to grow of active measures, of influence operations, and even of sabotage, which is going to be taking place in cyberspace.
And the GRU's hackers are at the leading edge of that. We start to see some of the deployment of hacking alongside military operations. 2008, when there's a brief conflict between
Russia and Georgia, and the US starts to see these hacking groups and US security researchers start giving them names for what are called APT's, Advanced Persistent Threat Groups, famously APT28, will become known as Fancy Bear. and be linked to the GRU. Bears are the terminology for Russian hackers, as opposed to things like pandas, which are the Chinese and so on.
This is CrowdStrike, which is an interesting cybersecurity company, came up with this. It was a great marketing wheeze, very successful.
Also, potentially why it's hard to take some of this stuff seriously, because you think, oh, well, it's a group called Fancy Bear that is seeking to undermine US democracy. And it's like, yeah, well, how bad could it be?
It's even worse. Right. Because the SVR, so the main foreign intelligence services hackers, are APT29 and they're known as Cozy Bear, which sounds even more kind of, you know, like comforting, like I'll just go hug a Cozy Bear. I mean, it's, yeah, I'm not quite sure.
And funnily enough, these are Western terms for these hackers, but some of them adopt it themselves and they start creating logos using these names. But APT29, Cozy Bear, SVR, they're quieter, they're doing the espionage, but the GRU's hackers are noisier. You start to see them picking up activity around Ukraine.
We talked last time a bit about how Ukraine was the testbed for a lot of Russian operations, information operations, but also cyber operations, after the 2014 overthrow of the pro-Russian government regime. Russia starts to try and subvert them. There's a really interesting case in May and June 2014 when word comes out that the GRU has penetrated the Ukrainian Electoral Commission's network.
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