New analysis suggests Guccifer 2.0 files copied locally, not hacked by Russia
RT | July 12, 2017
Files stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were likely downloaded to a USB drive by someone with physical access to a computer connected to the DNC network, not hacked remotely by Russia, according to a new analysis.
In an interview with Motherboard in June 2016, the hacker who claimed to be Guccifer 2.0 said he used a zero-day exploit to breach the DNC server and steal files he later published under the title “NGP-VAN.”
The leak was quickly attributed to the Russian government. However, a document published Sunday by an individual known as the Forensicator shows how the 7-zip file published by Guccifer 2.0 was transferred at a speed of 23 MB/s, making it “unlikely that this initial data transfer could have been done remotely over the Internet.”
“The initial copying activity was likely done from a computer system that had direct access to the data,” the report from the Forensicator stated. “By ‘direct access’ we mean that the individual who was collecting the data either had physical access to the computer where the data was stored, or the data was copied over a local high speed network (LAN).”
For his analysis, the Forensicator looked at the data from the 7-zip file which showed the .rar files were built on September 1, 2016, while the other files were last modified on July 5, 2016. When the .rar files are unpacked using a program called WinRAR, their timestamps were preserved from the date they were transferred.
The timestamps of those .rar files were relative times, while the times recorded in the 7-zip files are absolute times, recorded in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The Forensicator found that if the .rar files were adjusted to Eastern Time, they “fall into the same range as the last modified times for the directories archived in the .rar files.”
Therefore, the Forensicator concludes that the files were built on a computer system where the Eastern Daylight Savings Time (EDT) timezone setting was in force, meaning that the system was most likely located on the East Coast of the US.
The Forensicator then generated a list of the files sorted by the date they were last modified and imported the list into an Excel spreadsheet. Analyzing the files by date last modified, he observed that the last modified times were clustered together in a 14-minute time period on July 5, 2016.
The analysis of the metadata also found a majority of the time it took for the files to be copies, 12 minutes and 48 seconds of the 14 minutes and 15 seconds, was allocated to “time gaps” that appear between several top-level files and directories. The Forensicator concluded that this indicated that the files were chosen from a much larger collection of files.
Estimating the transfer speed of the files published by Guccifer, the Forensicator concluded that if the 1.98 GB 7-zip archive published by Guccifer was copied at a rate of 22.6 MB/s, and all the time gaps were attributed to additional file copying, the initial file copy would be 10 times larger, or 19.3 GB.
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Remembering Fallujah: The War Crimes Committed under Command of Jim Molan and Jim Mattis
Defending Australian Values in Iraq
By David Macilwain | American Herald tribune | February 8, 2018
Ross Caputi, a former Marine who was “witness and accomplice to the atrocities” committed in Fallujah in November 2004 during “Operation Phantom Fury”, wrote this about his unit’s entry into the city:
Perhaps it was just too painful of a realization for many of us to make, because we saw ourselves as the liberators, the good guys, and to admit that we were hurting innocent people would have contradicted everything that we claimed to stand for. I can only speculate about what the motives were for the people who dreamed up that mission and decided to make the people of Fallujah flee into the desert. Was it also too painful for the decision makers to admit to themselves that we were hurting innocent people? Or were they so evil that they just did not care who we were hurting? Whatever their reasons for doing it were, the fact of the matter is that our entire command was aware that we had forced the majority of the city’s population, about 200,000 people, into refugee status, but nobody took responsibility for their wellbeing, as international law required of us.
Central to that command was Major General Andrew “Jim” Molan, an Australian who was seconded to the US military in 2004 and took overall command of US coalition forces in Iraq, alongside the current US defence secretary Jim Mattis.
What happened in the so-called “second battle of Falluja” however, went far beyond a failure to attend to the needs of the civilian population who were able to flee the city before the US assault. Those who remained found themselves imprisoned in a “free-fire zone” for 10,500 US troops and 850 UK special forces, along with 2000 Iraqis loyal to the Occupation government in Baghdad.
While the “Battle for Falluja” has been glorified and celebrated as the most destructive and significant US battle since Vietnam, intended to be a final stand against insurgents who had become concentrated there, it has also been recognised as one of the worst war crimes committed by US coalition forces during the whole occupation of Iraq. … continue
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