Did you hear the big new hacking news? It’s the The news about ‘Fancy Bear’ already getting ready to wage a new hacking campaign against US politicians? If not, here’s a brief summary: Trend Micro, a Japanese cybersecurity firm, just issued a new report purporting to show that ‘Fancy Bear’ has already set up multiple phishing websites intended to capture the login credentials to the US Senate’s email system. And Trend Micro is 100 percent confident this is the work of ‘Fancy Bear’, the Russian military intelligence hacking team. What led to Trend Micro’s 100 percent certainty that these phishing sites were set up by ‘Fancy Bear’? It appears to be based on the similarity of this operation to the Macron email hack that impacted hit French election last year. The same hack that the French cybersecurity agency said was so unsophisticated that any reasonably skilled hackers could have pulled them off. And the same hacks comically included the name of a Russian government security contractor in the meta-data and were traced back to Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer. That’s the hack that this current Senate phishing operation strongly mimics that led to Trend Micro’s 100 percent certainty that this is the work of ‘Fancy Bear.’ So how credible is this 100 percent certain cyber attribution? Well, it’s possible Trend Micro is correct, it’s also extremely possible they aren’t correct. That’s going to be the topic if this post, because Trend Micro is far from alone in making cyber attribution an exercise in gambling with existential risks.
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