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So what is it I disagree with this comment.
1. There is nothing like that in English language blogs. - May be. But then what. That only means that those theoretic Web Brig-s didn't extended their activity on Western web sites. Which is strange.
2. There is nothing like that in English language blogs. - Another problem with this statemnt is that, while I'm not visiting English language blogs, I definetly see such impolite or agressive statements on YouTube. And many of those are made by Western and "prodemocratic" users. Like "You fucking arabs, we gonna screw you in Iraq", many of them contains hatred toward Russia, Vladimir Putin. And so on. So in this case it would be assumed those coments where done just by rough users and not some "CIA Web brigades". But when it comes to Russia it is credited to FSB and not such rough Russian users.
3. Both sides where using those bad words. So thats barrely an evidence of web brigades.
4. Be honest - it's just nobody care. Site admin can ban those ppls easyly and delete their offtopic posts, but he dind't done so. May be because FSB tell him not to do so :-))).-- Oleg Str ( talk) 09:21, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
I think this article resembles a lot an earlier version of Web brigades. Some of the text here is almost identical. Also, this article suffers from the same problems that plaqued Web brigades before it was improved by many different users. Starting from the name of the article: it should be "ALLEGED Internet operations by Russian secret police", since the existence of such operations is disputed. Creating an article with the current name could be seen as an attempt to give credibility to the existence of such operations. If I created an article called "Organization of the September 11 attacks by the Bush adminstration", that title would never be accepted by other editors. Offliner ( talk) 15:08, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
Support. Both articles are about the same fringe theory. POV-pushing editors are just trying to create miriads of BS articles about "Kremlin spying on us all" to make newcomers think it's a well-known fact. FeelSunny ( talk) 17:01, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
"he often sent his servicemen to branches of New York Public Library where they got access to the Internet without anyone knowing their identity. They placed propaganda and disinformation to various web sites and sent it in e-mails to US broadcasters"
Biophys, don't you understand yourself what bitter idiotism is this? Please, don't discredit your, no doubts, good views. ellol ( talk) 16:51, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
The result of the proposal was No consensus. 199.125.109.102 ( talk) 02:57, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
Internet operations by Russian secret police → Allegations of internet operations by Russian secret police — There is no evidence that there are Russian secret police operating on the internet in Russia as described by the article. As such, it is basically a conspiracy theory. WP:REDFLAG states that extraordinary claims require extraordinary sources, and the ramblings of a few individuals are not extraordinary sources. — Russavia Dialogue 00:04, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
*'''Support'''
or *'''Oppose'''
, then sign your comment with ~~~~
. Since
polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account
Wikipedia's naming conventions.If you want to merge this article with Web brigades please explain your position, debate and vote. Please stop unilateral deletions of the entire article. Thank you. Biophys ( talk) 03:47, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
On the afd most people agree that the name is POV as not all the alleged operations were supposedly work of the police. I have also added alleged as for many operations the direct involvement of the government is a matter of controversy. Alex Bakharev ( talk) 06:39, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Biophys ( talk) 00:39, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Support as per Alex. Also notice that Biophys in expecting people to engage in a debating society with him on the talk page, he has then gone and done this edit in order to prevent it being moved from this title. I think an explanation on that is warranted Biophys. -- Russavia Dialogue 05:40, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Oppose move. No better title has been proposed on the talkpage yet. Then again, I opposed it above already, didn't I? Oh, and WP:WEASEL, too. Διγουρεν Εμπρος! 10:12, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Oppose move. Well documented incidents, if editors feel "alleged" is required for specific incidents as being "controversial", well then, that's already taken care of. PetersV TALK 14:51, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Support. There's no proof of any "internet operations" - they are just allegations. Offliner ( talk) 14:55, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Support the move. No evidence. It's silly and idiotic. If you want to discuss FSB activities in the Internet, you should have started with technical specifications and legal position of the SORM. Rather than that there are tales by the former FSB people now living abroad, who might have simply invented the story to get the political asilym. The article is absolutely inbearable in view of human sanity. ellol ( talk) 09:13, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. It is not clear what name is actually being proposed here. Martintg ( talk) 11:07, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Could we show the courtesy of not moving until the discussion is done? PetersV TALK 22:50, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
I have removed this section, as it has nothing to do with internet operations by Russian secret police. It's inclusion in the article is improper synthesis. -- Russavia Dialogue 00:56, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
There was no consensus to move this page. But User:ellol still moved it by copy and paste. Acting in this manner is against WP:Consensus. Please do not do it again. Thank you. Biophys ( talk) 01:46, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
I will drop this matter as insignificant for now. However, consider yourself warned, Biophys. If you ever repeat this tactic in future, I will personally go over all of your edits to compile all the cases of such unwarranted edits of the redirect pages and will bring it up at appropriate notice board where you would have to explain these edits. ( Igny ( talk) 18:49, 29 March 2009 (UTC))
Contrary to lack of consensus (see above), this article was moved. This will be reverted. Biophys ( talk) 20:09, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
What undue weight and why are you talking about? Please explain. Actually, you just reverted all my edits: [1]. Biophys ( talk) 02:28, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
A number of publications suggested that intelligence agents may have infiltrated Wikipedia to remove undesirable information and insert disinformation [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]. According to publication in Russian computer weekly Computerra, anonymous editors have always "corrected" and continue "correcting" articles of Russian Wikipedia in the interests of special services, although "this is nothing special since everyone knows about the special place of the secret services in the structure of Russian state" [7]
The publication in Computerra tells about possible activity of Russian agents in wikipedia (mostly Russian Wikipedia). Please stop removing this. Biophys ( talk) 17:38, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
The alleged FSB activities on the Internet have been described in the short story "Anastasya" by Russian writer Grigory Svirsky, who was interested in the moral aspects of their work. [8] He wrote:
"It seems that offending, betraying, or even "murdering" people in the virtual space is easy. This is like killing an enemy in a video game: one does not see a disfigured body or the eyes of the person who is dying right in front of you. However, the human soul lives by its own basic laws that force it to pay the price for the virtual crime in his real life". [9]
According to claims of unnamed "Polish experts on Russian affairs", reported by the Polish newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny in 2005, at least a dozen active Russian agents work in Poland, also investigating the Polish Internet. The source also claims that the agents scrutinize Polish websites (like those supporting Belarusian opposition), and also perform such actions, as—for instance—contributing to Internet forums on large portals (like Gazeta.pl, Onet.pl, WP.pl). Labeled as Polish Internet users, they incite anti-Semitic or anti-Ukrainian discussions or disavow articles published on the web, according to the source.[29]
This text is obviously about Russian state agents who work in the internet. Please stop mass deletions of relevant and sourced texts. If you continue, I will have to ask 3rd opinions at RfC and perhaps at other noticeboards. Biophys ( talk) 17:53, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
A lot of funny conspiracy theories are going around regarding pecularities of Russian national interests. Some of them are rather hard to believe. But the plausibility of Internet brigades is significantly reinforced by the fact that a number of editors with well-known Russian connections keep attacking an article casting light onto the Internet brigades. If the Internet brigades' story were just an old wives' tale, it certainly wouldn't deserve such an attention, and instead of removing content from here, those people would actually watch out for this kind of vandalism, so it would be reverted a bit faster than in three hours' time. I guess Internet brigades' coverup is more important than ensuring the quality of an article about Russian economy. Very sad. Διγουρεν Εμπρος! 20:24, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
These texts that is content were usually not sourced and not encyclopedic. Zezen ( talk) 12:44, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
I have removed the following Agents in wikipedia section:
The only last sentence is marginally related to the topic of the article. The section might be inserted elsewhere, e.g. Internet_operations_by CIA or whatever Alex Bakharev ( talk) 04:23, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
References
See Talk:Web_brigades#Merge._again. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:52, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
There were several discussions of renaming/moves above. None of them produced consensus. So, please stop renaming this article from the original title. I am going to move it back to the original title. Biophys ( talk) 19:41, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
I made a number of changes as follows. First, I made some changes per discussions above, such as one suggested by Alex Bakharev. Second, I checked everythin for consistency with sources. If something is still inconsistent, please explain what is it. Third, I removed a couple of segments that provide opinion pieces by non-notable people (we do not even have articles about them). If there are objections, let's discuss. What is it? Biophys ( talk) 20:10, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
I can propose how this passage could sound: "According to a publication in Russian computer weekly Computerra, Russian security services are likely involved in editing Russian Wikipedia, similarly to the way English-American security services are editing the English Wikipedia, although "this is not even interesting to prove — everyone knows clearly that security bodies take a special place in structure of our [Russian] state" ellol ( talk) 20:39, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
Please stop the edit war. I have reverted back the article to its longstanding stable version. Discuss before making any more blind revert. -- Defender of torch ( talk) 16:38, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
I strongly disagree with this POV-pushing edit. First, the accusation of cyber warfare is made by multiple independent reliable sources, so it is a fact, not claim, per WP:CLAIM. And I object addition of Category:Conspiracy theories in this article. It is not supported by any neutral third party source that it is conspiracy theory or it is not a dominant view that it is a conspiracy theory. -- Defender of torch ( talk) 17:40, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
See this
First story.
...The most effective information, however, was not pro-Chechen, but anti-Russian. Digital images of bloody corpses served to turn public opinion against perceived Russian military excesses. In 1999, just as Kremlin officials were denying an incident in which a Chechen bus was attacked and many passengers killed, images of the incident appeared on the web.6 As technology progressed, internet surfers watched streaming videos of favorable Chechen military activity, such as ambushes on Russian military convoys.7
The Russian government admitted the need to improve its tactics in cyberspace. In 1999, Vladimir Putin, then Russia's Prime Minister, stated that “we surrendered this terrain some time ago ... but now we are entering the game again.” Moscow sought the help of the West in shutting down the important pro-Chechen kavkaz.org website, and “the introduction of centralized military censorship regarding the war in the North Caucasus” was announced.8
During the second Chechen war (1999-2000), Russian officials were accused of escalating the cyber conflict, by hacking into Chechen websites. The timing and sophistication of at least some of the attacks suggested nation state involvement. For example, kavkaz.org (hosted in the U.S.) was reportedly knocked offline simultaneous to the storming by Russian special forces of a Moscow theater under siege by Chechen terrorists.9
Second story
On April 26, 2007, the Estonian government moved a Soviet World War II memorial out of the center of its capital, Tallinn, in a move that inflamed public opinion both in Russia and among Estonia's Russian minority population.
Beginning on April 27, Estonian government, law enforcement, banking, media, and internet infrastructure endured three weeks of cyber attacks, whose impact still generates immense interest from governments around the world.
Because Estonians conduct over 98 percent of their banking online, the impact of multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, that severed all communications to the country's two largest banks for up to two hours and rendered international services partially unavailable for days at a time, is obvious.
Less widely discussed, but likely of greater consequence – both to national security planners and to computer network defense personnel – were the internet infrastructure (router) attacks on one of the Estonian government's ISPs, which are said to have disrupted government communications for at least a “short” period of time.
On the propaganda front, a hacker defaced the Estonian Prime Minister's political party website on April 27, changing the homepage text to a fabricated government apology for having moved the statue, along with a promise to move it back to its original location.25
Diplomatic interest in this cyber attack was high in part due to the possible reinterpretation of NATO's Article 5, which states that “an armed attack against one [Alliance member] “shall be considered an attack against them all.”26 Article 5 has been invoked only once, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Potentially, it could one day be interpreted to encompass cyber attacks as well.
More refs
Goble, Paul. “Russia: Analysis from Washington a Real Battle on the Virtual Front,” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, October 11, 1999, http://www.rferl.org/features/1999/10/F.RU.991011135919.asp.
Bullough, Oliver. “Russians Wage Cyber War on Chechen Websites,” Reuters, November 15, 2002, http://seclists.org/isn/2002/Nov/0064.html
Conspiracy theory? Allegations?
Biophys (
talk)
21:20, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
the article needs to be deleted/ merged per Wikipedia:V#Exceptional_claims_require_exceptional_sources, the title seriously violates Wikipedia:NPOV#Article_naming in virtually every point. The matter of the article is a fringe theory.
Because you just can't name an article "Obama eats kids", and then say in the second paragraph "Other than allegations, there is no evidence that Obama eats kids."
Long story short, the article is terrible as it is. Something has to be done about it. FeelSunny ( talk) 16:59, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
Vladimir Putin's Cyber Warriors; The Kremlin's Ham-handed Effort to Squelch Online Dissent by Andrei Soldatov December 9, 2011 Foreign Affairs 99.19.44.155 ( talk) 16:47, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
I deleted a sentence referring to Fancy Bear because the sources cited said nothing about it (of course, I might just have overlooked it), nor did they mention FireEye, ThreatConnect nor Kaspersky Lab. There seems to be a Guardian mention of Fancy Bear, and I hope somebody will check that out and insert it here if it is apropos. Sincerely, BeenAroundAWhile ( talk) 23:29, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
I suggest to either adjust or balance CrowdStrike's claims in this article. Because according to the Washington D.C. based Voice of America (VOA) which is the largest U.S. international broadcaster and also according to the not-for-profit and independent Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), CrowdStrike were recently exposed with their misattribution of quotes and fake information. In other words, CrowdStrike lied to you. CrowdStrike, the cyber-security firm that initially claimed Russia hacked the DNC and tilted the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor, is being accused of misattribution of quotes in a December report. CrowdStrike have since walked back key and central claims in said report, calling their credibility into serious question.
Related articles and sources
Related video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKJ7SRJuz-A&feature=youtu.be
Francewhoa ( talk) 22:52, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
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I've gone into much greater detail on
The Washington Post's debunked
"report" about Russia hacking Vermont's electric grid, and what it reveals about Wash Post's fact-checking standards (or lack thereof),
previously, but I'll keep my comments here relatively brief. An employee at
Burlington Electric Department came into contact with one of the 876 IPs flagged as "suspicious" by the FBI—DHS Joint Analysis Report (JAR) on Russian hacking—
nearly half of which are just
Tor exit nodes—while checking their email, but the traffic was by all appearances benign. Burlington Electric asked the U.S. government to investigate, and, sure enough, government officials almost immediately leaked a garbled description of the incident to Wash Post. Without contacting either of Vermont's two major utilities, as
proven via cached versions of the article available on the Internet Archive and confirmed by Burlington Electric itself (and contrary to Wash Post's disingenous denials), Wash Post then ran a sensational story claiming that "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through utility in Vermont, officials say"—based entirely on unnamed intelligence officers and with no corroborating evidence. Furious, Burlington Electric refuted the Wash Post account in a mere hour and a half, but it still spread like wildfire on social media. Wash Post changed the headline to "Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say" and grudgingly conceded: "An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid."
However, Wash Post refused to issue a formal retraction for another two days, and it seems that
BullRangifer has
managed to remain blissfully unaware of it for the past nine months. Without further ado, what follows are some choice excerpts from
"Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to investigation," The Washington Post, January 2, 2017:
Extended content:
|
---|
As federal officials investigate suspicious Internet activity found last week on a Vermont utility computer, they are finding evidence that the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility, according to experts and officials close to the investigation. An employee at Burlington Electric Department was checking his Yahoo email account Friday and triggered an alert indicating that his computer had connected to a suspicious IP address associated by authorities with the Russian hacking operation that infiltrated the Democratic Party. Officials told the company that traffic with this particular address is found elsewhere in the country and is not unique to Burlington Electric, suggesting the company wasn't being targeted by the Russians. Indeed, officials say it is possible that the traffic is benign, since this particular IP address is not always connected to malicious activity. ... Experts say the situation was made worse by a recent government report, which they described as a genuine effort to share information with the industry but criticized as rushed and prone to causing confusion. Authorities also were leaking information about the utility without having all the facts and before law enforcement officials were able to investigate further. ... "It's not descriptive of anything in particular," said Robert M. Lee, chief executive of Dragos, a cybersecurity firm. ... Some in the administration are concerned that this episode with the Vermont utility will cause industry officials to avoid sharing information with the government, for fear that it will be leaked. ... Experts also expressed concerns regarding the report released by DHS and the FBI on the Russian hacking operation. ... At least 30 percent of the IP addresses listed were commonly used sites such as public proxy servers used to mask a user's location, and servers run by Amazon.com and Yahoo. ... The IP address information alone is not useful, experts noted. Moreover, a server that is used by Russian spies one year might be used by "granny's bake shop" the next, Lee said. "No one should be making any attribution conclusions purely from the indicators in the [government] report," tweeted Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, which investigated the DNC hack and attributed it to the Russian government. "It was all a jumbled mess." |
To be blunt, it would be laughable to include any of this in an encyclopedia article on Cyberwarfare by Russia. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 07:10, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
"Undo removal of well-sourced content. The edit summary is a straw man. This article content gives context and detail. use talk if you wish to see this removed."In other words, because Wash Post is nominally a WP:RS, it can't be removed. But wait!—Wash Post later issued a separate retraction, admitting "Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to investigation." In sum: While checking his personal email, a Burlington Electric employee clicked on possible spam sent by an IP address that almost certainly does not geolocate to Russia, and nothing happened—the traffic may well have been benign. There was no connection to "Russian government hackers." Why would anyone think this belongs in Cyberwarfare by Russia? TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 20:14, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
"In fact, the use of stale sources is one of the most widespread devices of POV-pushing and non-policy compliant editing on Wikipedia."Would that include continuing to cite a Wash Post article nine months after it was retracted? TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 20:24, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
"This section reads more like a rant than the opening of a discussion."Yes, it does, but that's because I've left five comments, and no-one besides me is participating: It looks like I'm talking to myself. It may also look like I'm repeating myself: To reiterate, according to Wash Post and all RS, "Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to investigation." Why would you or anyone else think that this belongs in Cyberwarfare by Russia? TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 22:39, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
"It is possible that the [IP] traffic is benign"; and 3. There is nothing to support the attribution to "Russia"—let alone the Russian government! TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 23:47, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
TheTimesAreAChanging, has the Washington Post retraction article ""Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted..." ever been brought up here before, or used in the article? I wasn't aware of it. I was new to this article and made a few relatively minor edits and then tried to fix some confusion based on the existing sources. I was not aware of that retraction article. Mere mention of it in the edit summary was enough for me to resolve this matter, without this long polemic, attacks, and discussion. You could have saved yourself a lot of effort. The edit summary was enough for me to find the article, read it, and see that deletion was the best thing to do. RS, not vitriol, work best.
Calling it "fake news" in your edit summary was itself enough to raise concerns of a POV deletion by you, and thus your initial deletion was discounted as an unserious attempt to whitewash Russia without a RS justification. (Later you mentioned the retraction article to justify your deletion. For me that was serious and worked.)
WaPo doesn't write fake news (like the unreliable sources Breitbart, Daily Caller, Drudge Report, Infowars, etc. do so often), so don't misuse the term. Using the term the way Trump misuses it lessens your credibility. RS do make mistakes based on lack of information and the resulting confusion. Once things became clear, they wrote the type of proper retraction which fake news sources never publish. Such a retraction clears matters up enough for us to see that we shouldn't include that story. Keep in mind that it has no bearing on other stories about Russian cyberwarfare and interference.
This should be enough for us to close this thread. -- BullRangifer ( talk) 02:49, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
"I was not aware of that retraction article. Mere mention of it in the edit summary was enough for me to resolve this matter, without this long polemic, attacks, and discussion. You could have saved yourself a lot of effort. The edit summary was enough for me to find the article, read it, and see that deletion was the best thing to do."Thanks, BullRangifer, and noted: I realize that I made a number of unforced errors today. I hope that SPECIFICO and MjolnirPants will follow your example and WP:DROPTHESTICK. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 03:03, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
- On December 30, 2016, The Washington Post erroneously reported that the U.S. electric grid had been penetrated by Russian hackers through an unnamed Vermont utility. In fact, the laptop of a single Burlington Electric Department employee, which was not connected to the electric grid, came into contact with one of many IP addresses listed in a joint Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report as having at one point been used by Russian hackers, although the traffic may have been benign. The FBI-DHS report was widely dismissed by cybersecurity professionals, including Robert M. Lee of Dragos and Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike, because IP addresses alone are not useful indicators of Russian activity.
"The consensus is to change the section so that it is clear that this was very unlikely to be (or simply not) the work of Russia."While your profanity-laced blind reverts offer no indication that you are even vaguely familiar with the sources under discussion, if you are at all susceptible to sources or reason you should self-revert. It's surreal that after months of demanding that an erroneous report by The Washington Post be included, you would turn around and insist that the Post's retraction is unreliable and/or UNDUE. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 05:02, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
You're embarrassing yourself.
"You've taken partisan accusations by Greenwald, and tried to claim they were "uncontroversial matters of fact" wrt to whether or not WaPo made efforts to contact the utility company before running the story. They aren't."
- As I noted yesterday, it seemed odd that Burlington Electric issued a formal response refuting the Post's claims just an hour and a half after the Post's publication. This would suggest that the Post would have gotten a response from Burlington if only it had just contacted the utility prior to publication, as is required by standard journalistic practice.
- In fact, when I asked the Post why it had not contacted the utilities prior to publication, in her emailed response to me, Ms. Coratti asserted that the Post had indeed contacted both utilities for comment prior to publication and had not received a reply from either and so proceeded with publication. In fact, she went as far as to state "we had contacted the state’s two major power suppliers, as these sentences from the first version of the story attest: 'It is unclear which utility reported the incident. Officials from two major Vermont utilities, Green Mountain Power and Burlington Electric, could not be immediately reached for comment Friday.'"
- If this statement was present in the very first version of the story published at 7:55PM, that would mean that the Post had reached out to the companies for comment prior to publication and received no response.
- However, as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine shows, this is actually false. Archived snapshots of the story at 8:16PM and 8:46PM make no claims about having contacted either utility and state instead only that "While it is unclear which utility reported the incident, there are just two major utilities in Vermont, Green Mountain Power and Burlington Electric." No claim is made anywhere in the article about the Post having contacted the utilities for comment.
- In fact, it was not until an hour after publication, somewhere between 8:47PM and 9:24PM that the Post finally updated its story to include the statement above that it had contacted the two utilities for comment.
- I reached out to Mike Kanarick, Director of Customer Care, Community Engagement and Communications for Burlington Electric Department for comment on why his company had not responded to the Post's prepublication request for comment.
- It turns out that the reason that Burlington Electric did not respond to the Post's prepublication request for comment is that the Post actually did not reach out for comment until after it had already run its story. The Post's article went live on its website at 7:55PM EST, but according to Mr. Kanarick, the first contact from the Post was a phone call from reporter Adam Entous at 8:05PM, 10 minutes after the Post's story had been published.
- It is simply astounding that any newspaper, let alone one of the Post's reputation and stature, would run a story and then ten minutes after publication, turn around and finally ask the central focus of the article for comment.
"You have managed to imply that the accusations of this being Russian were coming entirely WaPo, when in fact, they were made by numerous sources, including the governor of Vermont and Sen. Patrick Leahy."
"You've neglected to mention the fact that it was the utility company who announced this event, not WaPo."
This article covers only a small part of the subject. We need to add manipulation of social media, fake news, and other recent innovations of the Russian approach. To outline the structure, I suggest we repurpose some of the content already developed for other related articles. SPECIFICO talk 02:19, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
SPECIFICO, I think you have it bass ackwards. We should not pick a topic and find notability, we should choose notable topics and write about them. I take it you hate Trump, but let's follow policy. TFD ( talk) 05:30, 16 September 2017 (UTC)
I can see there's previously been some discussion about changing the title. I note that the corresponding article for the United States is title Cyberwarfare in the United States, would it make sense to change the title here into the same format? Specifically, using 'in the' instead of 'by'. Gabriel syme ( talk) 20:29, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
Factual information as to the British investigation has been removed with an edit summary that asserts a false equivalence with the UNDUE ratification of self-serving facebook statement by an academic source. This doesn't speak to the issues identified in previous edits, and the Brit bit stands on its merits. SPECIFICO talk 04:40, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
I have removed the following paragraph, which was added by User:Fyeahadrianax in April, and reflects that user's only edits:
October 2016 the US officially accused Russia of involvement in hacking into distributive numerical control computers also known as DNC to interfere with the network in the great attempt to obstruct the presidential elections. , “US Officially Accuses Russia of Hacking DNC and Interfering with Election,” The Guardian, October 8, 2016, accessed August 13, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/07/us-russia-dnc-hack- interfering-presidential-electionNot only was it confirmed that there was proof of medaling with the elections there was evidence that the one who ordered for the election to be tampered with was by the Russian President Vladimir Putin so that the chances of Donald Trump becoming the next president would be much higher, “Putin Ordered ‘Influence Campaign’ Aimed at U.S. Election, Report Says,” The New York Times, January 6, 2017, accessed July 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russia-hack-report.html Cyber warfare can instill discord, confusion even mayhem in certain instances.
Obviously, this is at best ignorant, and at worst a hoax, since the "DNC" referred to in the article has nothing to do with "distributive numerical control". bd2412 T 03:34, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
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So what is it I disagree with this comment.
1. There is nothing like that in English language blogs. - May be. But then what. That only means that those theoretic Web Brig-s didn't extended their activity on Western web sites. Which is strange.
2. There is nothing like that in English language blogs. - Another problem with this statemnt is that, while I'm not visiting English language blogs, I definetly see such impolite or agressive statements on YouTube. And many of those are made by Western and "prodemocratic" users. Like "You fucking arabs, we gonna screw you in Iraq", many of them contains hatred toward Russia, Vladimir Putin. And so on. So in this case it would be assumed those coments where done just by rough users and not some "CIA Web brigades". But when it comes to Russia it is credited to FSB and not such rough Russian users.
3. Both sides where using those bad words. So thats barrely an evidence of web brigades.
4. Be honest - it's just nobody care. Site admin can ban those ppls easyly and delete their offtopic posts, but he dind't done so. May be because FSB tell him not to do so :-))).-- Oleg Str ( talk) 09:21, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
I think this article resembles a lot an earlier version of Web brigades. Some of the text here is almost identical. Also, this article suffers from the same problems that plaqued Web brigades before it was improved by many different users. Starting from the name of the article: it should be "ALLEGED Internet operations by Russian secret police", since the existence of such operations is disputed. Creating an article with the current name could be seen as an attempt to give credibility to the existence of such operations. If I created an article called "Organization of the September 11 attacks by the Bush adminstration", that title would never be accepted by other editors. Offliner ( talk) 15:08, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
Support. Both articles are about the same fringe theory. POV-pushing editors are just trying to create miriads of BS articles about "Kremlin spying on us all" to make newcomers think it's a well-known fact. FeelSunny ( talk) 17:01, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
"he often sent his servicemen to branches of New York Public Library where they got access to the Internet without anyone knowing their identity. They placed propaganda and disinformation to various web sites and sent it in e-mails to US broadcasters"
Biophys, don't you understand yourself what bitter idiotism is this? Please, don't discredit your, no doubts, good views. ellol ( talk) 16:51, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
The result of the proposal was No consensus. 199.125.109.102 ( talk) 02:57, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
Internet operations by Russian secret police → Allegations of internet operations by Russian secret police — There is no evidence that there are Russian secret police operating on the internet in Russia as described by the article. As such, it is basically a conspiracy theory. WP:REDFLAG states that extraordinary claims require extraordinary sources, and the ramblings of a few individuals are not extraordinary sources. — Russavia Dialogue 00:04, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
*'''Support'''
or *'''Oppose'''
, then sign your comment with ~~~~
. Since
polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account
Wikipedia's naming conventions.If you want to merge this article with Web brigades please explain your position, debate and vote. Please stop unilateral deletions of the entire article. Thank you. Biophys ( talk) 03:47, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
On the afd most people agree that the name is POV as not all the alleged operations were supposedly work of the police. I have also added alleged as for many operations the direct involvement of the government is a matter of controversy. Alex Bakharev ( talk) 06:39, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Biophys ( talk) 00:39, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Support as per Alex. Also notice that Biophys in expecting people to engage in a debating society with him on the talk page, he has then gone and done this edit in order to prevent it being moved from this title. I think an explanation on that is warranted Biophys. -- Russavia Dialogue 05:40, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Oppose move. No better title has been proposed on the talkpage yet. Then again, I opposed it above already, didn't I? Oh, and WP:WEASEL, too. Διγουρεν Εμπρος! 10:12, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Oppose move. Well documented incidents, if editors feel "alleged" is required for specific incidents as being "controversial", well then, that's already taken care of. PetersV TALK 14:51, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Support. There's no proof of any "internet operations" - they are just allegations. Offliner ( talk) 14:55, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Support the move. No evidence. It's silly and idiotic. If you want to discuss FSB activities in the Internet, you should have started with technical specifications and legal position of the SORM. Rather than that there are tales by the former FSB people now living abroad, who might have simply invented the story to get the political asilym. The article is absolutely inbearable in view of human sanity. ellol ( talk) 09:13, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. It is not clear what name is actually being proposed here. Martintg ( talk) 11:07, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Could we show the courtesy of not moving until the discussion is done? PetersV TALK 22:50, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
I have removed this section, as it has nothing to do with internet operations by Russian secret police. It's inclusion in the article is improper synthesis. -- Russavia Dialogue 00:56, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
There was no consensus to move this page. But User:ellol still moved it by copy and paste. Acting in this manner is against WP:Consensus. Please do not do it again. Thank you. Biophys ( talk) 01:46, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
I will drop this matter as insignificant for now. However, consider yourself warned, Biophys. If you ever repeat this tactic in future, I will personally go over all of your edits to compile all the cases of such unwarranted edits of the redirect pages and will bring it up at appropriate notice board where you would have to explain these edits. ( Igny ( talk) 18:49, 29 March 2009 (UTC))
Contrary to lack of consensus (see above), this article was moved. This will be reverted. Biophys ( talk) 20:09, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
What undue weight and why are you talking about? Please explain. Actually, you just reverted all my edits: [1]. Biophys ( talk) 02:28, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
A number of publications suggested that intelligence agents may have infiltrated Wikipedia to remove undesirable information and insert disinformation [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]. According to publication in Russian computer weekly Computerra, anonymous editors have always "corrected" and continue "correcting" articles of Russian Wikipedia in the interests of special services, although "this is nothing special since everyone knows about the special place of the secret services in the structure of Russian state" [7]
The publication in Computerra tells about possible activity of Russian agents in wikipedia (mostly Russian Wikipedia). Please stop removing this. Biophys ( talk) 17:38, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
The alleged FSB activities on the Internet have been described in the short story "Anastasya" by Russian writer Grigory Svirsky, who was interested in the moral aspects of their work. [8] He wrote:
"It seems that offending, betraying, or even "murdering" people in the virtual space is easy. This is like killing an enemy in a video game: one does not see a disfigured body or the eyes of the person who is dying right in front of you. However, the human soul lives by its own basic laws that force it to pay the price for the virtual crime in his real life". [9]
According to claims of unnamed "Polish experts on Russian affairs", reported by the Polish newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny in 2005, at least a dozen active Russian agents work in Poland, also investigating the Polish Internet. The source also claims that the agents scrutinize Polish websites (like those supporting Belarusian opposition), and also perform such actions, as—for instance—contributing to Internet forums on large portals (like Gazeta.pl, Onet.pl, WP.pl). Labeled as Polish Internet users, they incite anti-Semitic or anti-Ukrainian discussions or disavow articles published on the web, according to the source.[29]
This text is obviously about Russian state agents who work in the internet. Please stop mass deletions of relevant and sourced texts. If you continue, I will have to ask 3rd opinions at RfC and perhaps at other noticeboards. Biophys ( talk) 17:53, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
A lot of funny conspiracy theories are going around regarding pecularities of Russian national interests. Some of them are rather hard to believe. But the plausibility of Internet brigades is significantly reinforced by the fact that a number of editors with well-known Russian connections keep attacking an article casting light onto the Internet brigades. If the Internet brigades' story were just an old wives' tale, it certainly wouldn't deserve such an attention, and instead of removing content from here, those people would actually watch out for this kind of vandalism, so it would be reverted a bit faster than in three hours' time. I guess Internet brigades' coverup is more important than ensuring the quality of an article about Russian economy. Very sad. Διγουρεν Εμπρος! 20:24, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
These texts that is content were usually not sourced and not encyclopedic. Zezen ( talk) 12:44, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
I have removed the following Agents in wikipedia section:
The only last sentence is marginally related to the topic of the article. The section might be inserted elsewhere, e.g. Internet_operations_by CIA or whatever Alex Bakharev ( talk) 04:23, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
References
See Talk:Web_brigades#Merge._again. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:52, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
There were several discussions of renaming/moves above. None of them produced consensus. So, please stop renaming this article from the original title. I am going to move it back to the original title. Biophys ( talk) 19:41, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
I made a number of changes as follows. First, I made some changes per discussions above, such as one suggested by Alex Bakharev. Second, I checked everythin for consistency with sources. If something is still inconsistent, please explain what is it. Third, I removed a couple of segments that provide opinion pieces by non-notable people (we do not even have articles about them). If there are objections, let's discuss. What is it? Biophys ( talk) 20:10, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
I can propose how this passage could sound: "According to a publication in Russian computer weekly Computerra, Russian security services are likely involved in editing Russian Wikipedia, similarly to the way English-American security services are editing the English Wikipedia, although "this is not even interesting to prove — everyone knows clearly that security bodies take a special place in structure of our [Russian] state" ellol ( talk) 20:39, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
Please stop the edit war. I have reverted back the article to its longstanding stable version. Discuss before making any more blind revert. -- Defender of torch ( talk) 16:38, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
I strongly disagree with this POV-pushing edit. First, the accusation of cyber warfare is made by multiple independent reliable sources, so it is a fact, not claim, per WP:CLAIM. And I object addition of Category:Conspiracy theories in this article. It is not supported by any neutral third party source that it is conspiracy theory or it is not a dominant view that it is a conspiracy theory. -- Defender of torch ( talk) 17:40, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
See this
First story.
...The most effective information, however, was not pro-Chechen, but anti-Russian. Digital images of bloody corpses served to turn public opinion against perceived Russian military excesses. In 1999, just as Kremlin officials were denying an incident in which a Chechen bus was attacked and many passengers killed, images of the incident appeared on the web.6 As technology progressed, internet surfers watched streaming videos of favorable Chechen military activity, such as ambushes on Russian military convoys.7
The Russian government admitted the need to improve its tactics in cyberspace. In 1999, Vladimir Putin, then Russia's Prime Minister, stated that “we surrendered this terrain some time ago ... but now we are entering the game again.” Moscow sought the help of the West in shutting down the important pro-Chechen kavkaz.org website, and “the introduction of centralized military censorship regarding the war in the North Caucasus” was announced.8
During the second Chechen war (1999-2000), Russian officials were accused of escalating the cyber conflict, by hacking into Chechen websites. The timing and sophistication of at least some of the attacks suggested nation state involvement. For example, kavkaz.org (hosted in the U.S.) was reportedly knocked offline simultaneous to the storming by Russian special forces of a Moscow theater under siege by Chechen terrorists.9
Second story
On April 26, 2007, the Estonian government moved a Soviet World War II memorial out of the center of its capital, Tallinn, in a move that inflamed public opinion both in Russia and among Estonia's Russian minority population.
Beginning on April 27, Estonian government, law enforcement, banking, media, and internet infrastructure endured three weeks of cyber attacks, whose impact still generates immense interest from governments around the world.
Because Estonians conduct over 98 percent of their banking online, the impact of multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, that severed all communications to the country's two largest banks for up to two hours and rendered international services partially unavailable for days at a time, is obvious.
Less widely discussed, but likely of greater consequence – both to national security planners and to computer network defense personnel – were the internet infrastructure (router) attacks on one of the Estonian government's ISPs, which are said to have disrupted government communications for at least a “short” period of time.
On the propaganda front, a hacker defaced the Estonian Prime Minister's political party website on April 27, changing the homepage text to a fabricated government apology for having moved the statue, along with a promise to move it back to its original location.25
Diplomatic interest in this cyber attack was high in part due to the possible reinterpretation of NATO's Article 5, which states that “an armed attack against one [Alliance member] “shall be considered an attack against them all.”26 Article 5 has been invoked only once, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Potentially, it could one day be interpreted to encompass cyber attacks as well.
More refs
Goble, Paul. “Russia: Analysis from Washington a Real Battle on the Virtual Front,” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, October 11, 1999, http://www.rferl.org/features/1999/10/F.RU.991011135919.asp.
Bullough, Oliver. “Russians Wage Cyber War on Chechen Websites,” Reuters, November 15, 2002, http://seclists.org/isn/2002/Nov/0064.html
Conspiracy theory? Allegations?
Biophys (
talk)
21:20, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
the article needs to be deleted/ merged per Wikipedia:V#Exceptional_claims_require_exceptional_sources, the title seriously violates Wikipedia:NPOV#Article_naming in virtually every point. The matter of the article is a fringe theory.
Because you just can't name an article "Obama eats kids", and then say in the second paragraph "Other than allegations, there is no evidence that Obama eats kids."
Long story short, the article is terrible as it is. Something has to be done about it. FeelSunny ( talk) 16:59, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
Vladimir Putin's Cyber Warriors; The Kremlin's Ham-handed Effort to Squelch Online Dissent by Andrei Soldatov December 9, 2011 Foreign Affairs 99.19.44.155 ( talk) 16:47, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
I deleted a sentence referring to Fancy Bear because the sources cited said nothing about it (of course, I might just have overlooked it), nor did they mention FireEye, ThreatConnect nor Kaspersky Lab. There seems to be a Guardian mention of Fancy Bear, and I hope somebody will check that out and insert it here if it is apropos. Sincerely, BeenAroundAWhile ( talk) 23:29, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
I suggest to either adjust or balance CrowdStrike's claims in this article. Because according to the Washington D.C. based Voice of America (VOA) which is the largest U.S. international broadcaster and also according to the not-for-profit and independent Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), CrowdStrike were recently exposed with their misattribution of quotes and fake information. In other words, CrowdStrike lied to you. CrowdStrike, the cyber-security firm that initially claimed Russia hacked the DNC and tilted the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor, is being accused of misattribution of quotes in a December report. CrowdStrike have since walked back key and central claims in said report, calling their credibility into serious question.
Related articles and sources
Related video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKJ7SRJuz-A&feature=youtu.be
Francewhoa ( talk) 22:52, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
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I've gone into much greater detail on
The Washington Post's debunked
"report" about Russia hacking Vermont's electric grid, and what it reveals about Wash Post's fact-checking standards (or lack thereof),
previously, but I'll keep my comments here relatively brief. An employee at
Burlington Electric Department came into contact with one of the 876 IPs flagged as "suspicious" by the FBI—DHS Joint Analysis Report (JAR) on Russian hacking—
nearly half of which are just
Tor exit nodes—while checking their email, but the traffic was by all appearances benign. Burlington Electric asked the U.S. government to investigate, and, sure enough, government officials almost immediately leaked a garbled description of the incident to Wash Post. Without contacting either of Vermont's two major utilities, as
proven via cached versions of the article available on the Internet Archive and confirmed by Burlington Electric itself (and contrary to Wash Post's disingenous denials), Wash Post then ran a sensational story claiming that "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through utility in Vermont, officials say"—based entirely on unnamed intelligence officers and with no corroborating evidence. Furious, Burlington Electric refuted the Wash Post account in a mere hour and a half, but it still spread like wildfire on social media. Wash Post changed the headline to "Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say" and grudgingly conceded: "An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid."
However, Wash Post refused to issue a formal retraction for another two days, and it seems that
BullRangifer has
managed to remain blissfully unaware of it for the past nine months. Without further ado, what follows are some choice excerpts from
"Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to investigation," The Washington Post, January 2, 2017:
Extended content:
|
---|
As federal officials investigate suspicious Internet activity found last week on a Vermont utility computer, they are finding evidence that the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility, according to experts and officials close to the investigation. An employee at Burlington Electric Department was checking his Yahoo email account Friday and triggered an alert indicating that his computer had connected to a suspicious IP address associated by authorities with the Russian hacking operation that infiltrated the Democratic Party. Officials told the company that traffic with this particular address is found elsewhere in the country and is not unique to Burlington Electric, suggesting the company wasn't being targeted by the Russians. Indeed, officials say it is possible that the traffic is benign, since this particular IP address is not always connected to malicious activity. ... Experts say the situation was made worse by a recent government report, which they described as a genuine effort to share information with the industry but criticized as rushed and prone to causing confusion. Authorities also were leaking information about the utility without having all the facts and before law enforcement officials were able to investigate further. ... "It's not descriptive of anything in particular," said Robert M. Lee, chief executive of Dragos, a cybersecurity firm. ... Some in the administration are concerned that this episode with the Vermont utility will cause industry officials to avoid sharing information with the government, for fear that it will be leaked. ... Experts also expressed concerns regarding the report released by DHS and the FBI on the Russian hacking operation. ... At least 30 percent of the IP addresses listed were commonly used sites such as public proxy servers used to mask a user's location, and servers run by Amazon.com and Yahoo. ... The IP address information alone is not useful, experts noted. Moreover, a server that is used by Russian spies one year might be used by "granny's bake shop" the next, Lee said. "No one should be making any attribution conclusions purely from the indicators in the [government] report," tweeted Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, which investigated the DNC hack and attributed it to the Russian government. "It was all a jumbled mess." |
To be blunt, it would be laughable to include any of this in an encyclopedia article on Cyberwarfare by Russia. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 07:10, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
"Undo removal of well-sourced content. The edit summary is a straw man. This article content gives context and detail. use talk if you wish to see this removed."In other words, because Wash Post is nominally a WP:RS, it can't be removed. But wait!—Wash Post later issued a separate retraction, admitting "Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to investigation." In sum: While checking his personal email, a Burlington Electric employee clicked on possible spam sent by an IP address that almost certainly does not geolocate to Russia, and nothing happened—the traffic may well have been benign. There was no connection to "Russian government hackers." Why would anyone think this belongs in Cyberwarfare by Russia? TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 20:14, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
"In fact, the use of stale sources is one of the most widespread devices of POV-pushing and non-policy compliant editing on Wikipedia."Would that include continuing to cite a Wash Post article nine months after it was retracted? TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 20:24, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
"This section reads more like a rant than the opening of a discussion."Yes, it does, but that's because I've left five comments, and no-one besides me is participating: It looks like I'm talking to myself. It may also look like I'm repeating myself: To reiterate, according to Wash Post and all RS, "Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to investigation." Why would you or anyone else think that this belongs in Cyberwarfare by Russia? TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 22:39, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
"It is possible that the [IP] traffic is benign"; and 3. There is nothing to support the attribution to "Russia"—let alone the Russian government! TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 23:47, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
TheTimesAreAChanging, has the Washington Post retraction article ""Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted..." ever been brought up here before, or used in the article? I wasn't aware of it. I was new to this article and made a few relatively minor edits and then tried to fix some confusion based on the existing sources. I was not aware of that retraction article. Mere mention of it in the edit summary was enough for me to resolve this matter, without this long polemic, attacks, and discussion. You could have saved yourself a lot of effort. The edit summary was enough for me to find the article, read it, and see that deletion was the best thing to do. RS, not vitriol, work best.
Calling it "fake news" in your edit summary was itself enough to raise concerns of a POV deletion by you, and thus your initial deletion was discounted as an unserious attempt to whitewash Russia without a RS justification. (Later you mentioned the retraction article to justify your deletion. For me that was serious and worked.)
WaPo doesn't write fake news (like the unreliable sources Breitbart, Daily Caller, Drudge Report, Infowars, etc. do so often), so don't misuse the term. Using the term the way Trump misuses it lessens your credibility. RS do make mistakes based on lack of information and the resulting confusion. Once things became clear, they wrote the type of proper retraction which fake news sources never publish. Such a retraction clears matters up enough for us to see that we shouldn't include that story. Keep in mind that it has no bearing on other stories about Russian cyberwarfare and interference.
This should be enough for us to close this thread. -- BullRangifer ( talk) 02:49, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
"I was not aware of that retraction article. Mere mention of it in the edit summary was enough for me to resolve this matter, without this long polemic, attacks, and discussion. You could have saved yourself a lot of effort. The edit summary was enough for me to find the article, read it, and see that deletion was the best thing to do."Thanks, BullRangifer, and noted: I realize that I made a number of unforced errors today. I hope that SPECIFICO and MjolnirPants will follow your example and WP:DROPTHESTICK. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 03:03, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
- On December 30, 2016, The Washington Post erroneously reported that the U.S. electric grid had been penetrated by Russian hackers through an unnamed Vermont utility. In fact, the laptop of a single Burlington Electric Department employee, which was not connected to the electric grid, came into contact with one of many IP addresses listed in a joint Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report as having at one point been used by Russian hackers, although the traffic may have been benign. The FBI-DHS report was widely dismissed by cybersecurity professionals, including Robert M. Lee of Dragos and Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike, because IP addresses alone are not useful indicators of Russian activity.
"The consensus is to change the section so that it is clear that this was very unlikely to be (or simply not) the work of Russia."While your profanity-laced blind reverts offer no indication that you are even vaguely familiar with the sources under discussion, if you are at all susceptible to sources or reason you should self-revert. It's surreal that after months of demanding that an erroneous report by The Washington Post be included, you would turn around and insist that the Post's retraction is unreliable and/or UNDUE. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 05:02, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
You're embarrassing yourself.
"You've taken partisan accusations by Greenwald, and tried to claim they were "uncontroversial matters of fact" wrt to whether or not WaPo made efforts to contact the utility company before running the story. They aren't."
- As I noted yesterday, it seemed odd that Burlington Electric issued a formal response refuting the Post's claims just an hour and a half after the Post's publication. This would suggest that the Post would have gotten a response from Burlington if only it had just contacted the utility prior to publication, as is required by standard journalistic practice.
- In fact, when I asked the Post why it had not contacted the utilities prior to publication, in her emailed response to me, Ms. Coratti asserted that the Post had indeed contacted both utilities for comment prior to publication and had not received a reply from either and so proceeded with publication. In fact, she went as far as to state "we had contacted the state’s two major power suppliers, as these sentences from the first version of the story attest: 'It is unclear which utility reported the incident. Officials from two major Vermont utilities, Green Mountain Power and Burlington Electric, could not be immediately reached for comment Friday.'"
- If this statement was present in the very first version of the story published at 7:55PM, that would mean that the Post had reached out to the companies for comment prior to publication and received no response.
- However, as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine shows, this is actually false. Archived snapshots of the story at 8:16PM and 8:46PM make no claims about having contacted either utility and state instead only that "While it is unclear which utility reported the incident, there are just two major utilities in Vermont, Green Mountain Power and Burlington Electric." No claim is made anywhere in the article about the Post having contacted the utilities for comment.
- In fact, it was not until an hour after publication, somewhere between 8:47PM and 9:24PM that the Post finally updated its story to include the statement above that it had contacted the two utilities for comment.
- I reached out to Mike Kanarick, Director of Customer Care, Community Engagement and Communications for Burlington Electric Department for comment on why his company had not responded to the Post's prepublication request for comment.
- It turns out that the reason that Burlington Electric did not respond to the Post's prepublication request for comment is that the Post actually did not reach out for comment until after it had already run its story. The Post's article went live on its website at 7:55PM EST, but according to Mr. Kanarick, the first contact from the Post was a phone call from reporter Adam Entous at 8:05PM, 10 minutes after the Post's story had been published.
- It is simply astounding that any newspaper, let alone one of the Post's reputation and stature, would run a story and then ten minutes after publication, turn around and finally ask the central focus of the article for comment.
"You have managed to imply that the accusations of this being Russian were coming entirely WaPo, when in fact, they were made by numerous sources, including the governor of Vermont and Sen. Patrick Leahy."
"You've neglected to mention the fact that it was the utility company who announced this event, not WaPo."
This article covers only a small part of the subject. We need to add manipulation of social media, fake news, and other recent innovations of the Russian approach. To outline the structure, I suggest we repurpose some of the content already developed for other related articles. SPECIFICO talk 02:19, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
SPECIFICO, I think you have it bass ackwards. We should not pick a topic and find notability, we should choose notable topics and write about them. I take it you hate Trump, but let's follow policy. TFD ( talk) 05:30, 16 September 2017 (UTC)
I can see there's previously been some discussion about changing the title. I note that the corresponding article for the United States is title Cyberwarfare in the United States, would it make sense to change the title here into the same format? Specifically, using 'in the' instead of 'by'. Gabriel syme ( talk) 20:29, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
Factual information as to the British investigation has been removed with an edit summary that asserts a false equivalence with the UNDUE ratification of self-serving facebook statement by an academic source. This doesn't speak to the issues identified in previous edits, and the Brit bit stands on its merits. SPECIFICO talk 04:40, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
I have removed the following paragraph, which was added by User:Fyeahadrianax in April, and reflects that user's only edits:
October 2016 the US officially accused Russia of involvement in hacking into distributive numerical control computers also known as DNC to interfere with the network in the great attempt to obstruct the presidential elections. , “US Officially Accuses Russia of Hacking DNC and Interfering with Election,” The Guardian, October 8, 2016, accessed August 13, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/07/us-russia-dnc-hack- interfering-presidential-electionNot only was it confirmed that there was proof of medaling with the elections there was evidence that the one who ordered for the election to be tampered with was by the Russian President Vladimir Putin so that the chances of Donald Trump becoming the next president would be much higher, “Putin Ordered ‘Influence Campaign’ Aimed at U.S. Election, Report Says,” The New York Times, January 6, 2017, accessed July 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russia-hack-report.html Cyber warfare can instill discord, confusion even mayhem in certain instances.
Obviously, this is at best ignorant, and at worst a hoax, since the "DNC" referred to in the article has nothing to do with "distributive numerical control". bd2412 T 03:34, 22 July 2019 (UTC)