{"id":175935,"date":"2020-12-28T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2020-12-28T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=175935"},"modified":"2020-12-27T06:51:34","modified_gmt":"2020-12-27T06:51:34","slug":"russian-hacking-nato-psyop-revealed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/12\/russian-hacking-nato-psyop-revealed\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cRussian Hacking\u201d: NATO PsyOp Revealed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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CrowdStrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch (center) at the US-NATO Atlantic Council, 2014 (AC)<\/p><\/div>\n

December 2020 – The \u201cRussian hacking\u201d NATO psyop has finally been solved.<\/em><\/p>\n

To professional analysts, it has long been clear that the \u201cRussiagate\u201d saga<\/strong> \u2013 including the \u201cRussian hacking\u201d claims, the Trump-Russia collusion claims, as well as the \u201cSkripal poisoning incident\u201d and the more recent \u201cNavalny poisoning incident\u201d \u2013 has been a US and NATO psychological operation<\/a> aimed at containing a resurgent Russia and a somewhat unpredictable US President.<\/p>\n

Several aspects of the \u201cRussian hacking\u201d psychological operation<\/strong> had already been uncovered by independent researchers like Stephen McIntyre<\/a>, \u201cAdam Carter\u201d<\/a> and \u201cThe Forensicator\u201d<\/a>. In early November, however, British researcher David J. Blake<\/a> essentially solved the \u201cRussian hacking\u201d psyop, down to the operational level, as described in his new book \u201cLoaded for Guccifer 2.0\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Blake shows how the \u201cRussian hacking\u201d psyop was initiated by the US and NATO in 2014 in response to Russia\u2019s reaction to the US regime change in Ukraine<\/strong><\/a>, when Russia retook control of the Crimean Peninsula and supported the de-facto secession of Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n

The US\/NATO psyop was inspired by the actual amateur hackers \u201cCyberBerkut\u201d<\/a> in Ukraine and \u201cGuccifer\u201d<\/a> in Romania. Blake shows how in 2014, NATO created a \u201cCyber Defence Trust Fund\u201d<\/strong> and used this entity to initiate false-flag \u201chacking operations\u201d against the US and other NATO members that would then be falsely \u201cattributed\u201d to alleged Russian \u201cstate-sponsored hacking groups\u201d.<\/p>\n

Regarding the most prominent case, the alleged \u201chacking\u201d of the US Democratic Party (DNC)<\/strong> and the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Blake shows how the emails and documents in question were in fact exfiltrated by the FBI and FBI cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike, whose founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a Senior Fellow at the US-NATO think tank Atlantic Council. (1)<\/p>\n

Blake shows how the mysterious persona of Guccifer 2.0<\/strong>, who claimed the hack, was played by none other than Alperovitch himself, while the technical infrastructure, including the notorious website dcleaks.com, was provided by US and NATO intermediaries in NATO member Romania.<\/p>\n

Later, former FBI director Robert Mueller<\/strong> would pretend to \u201cinvestigate\u201d the cyber operation, attributing it to alleged \u201cRussian hacking groups\u201d named \u201cCozy Bear\u201d and \u201cFancy Bear\u201d based on information provided by FBI and DNC contractor CrowdStrike and its CTO Dmitri Alperovitch.<\/p>\n

Blake also shows how other alleged \u201cRussian hacks\u201d, including the \u201chacking\u201d of the German parlia\u00adment<\/strong> in 2015, relied on the very same NATO-controlled technical infrastructure. Blake was able to show this based on archived information about previous owners of IP addresses, name servers, and SSL security certificates \u2013 all pointing to the US military, NATO and the Ukrainian government.<\/p>\n

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US\/NATO-controlled IT used for \u201cRussian\u201d hacking and phishing operations (DJB<\/a>)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the case of the staged hack of the US Democratic Party, Blake shows how FBI cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike added false \u201cRussian fingerprints\u201d<\/strong> by embedding the documents into previously published CyberBerkut documents and inserting additional false signatures. However, CrowdStrike made several technical mistakes that ultimately revealed their US time zone.<\/p>\n

Blake highlights the important fact that in all of these false-flag \u201cRussian hacks\u201d, originating from NATO-controlled infrastructure, either no data or only trivial data was released to the public. Some questions continue to remain open, however, such as the role of murdered DNC employee Seth Rich<\/a> and the actual source of Wikileaks<\/strong>, whose founder Julian Assange is still in British custody.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the 2014 US regime change in Ukraine, the family of then Vice President Joe Biden<\/strong> exfiltrated millions of dollars<\/a> from Ukraine, protected against corruption investigations by Joe Biden himself, as leaked phone recordings<\/a> confirmed. As of 2021, the professionals behind the Ukraine regime change and the \u201cRussiagate\u201d pysop will once again be in full control<\/a> of the US government.<\/p>\n

Most US and European media<\/strong> have promoted the \u201cRussiagate\u201d and \u201cRussian hacking\u201d psyops and will continue to do so. This is because most US and European media, both liberal and conservative, are themselves embedded in networks<\/a> linked to NATO and the US Council on Foreign Relations. It is only some independent media<\/a> that have been seriously investigating these topics.<\/p>\n

Are there real Russian state-sponsored hacks<\/strong> against Western targets? Yes. Blake argues that, for instance, the hacking operation against the British Institute for Statecraft and its \u201cIntegrity Initiative\u201d<\/a> \u2013 itself deeply involved in the \u201cRussiagate\u201d psyop \u2013 was likely a professional Russian operation. The problem is that such real operations are much harder to \u201cattribute\u201d than fake ones.<\/p>\n

Besides US and Russian cyber operations, there are also, of course, Chinese operations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Book<\/strong>: Loaded for Guccifer2.0: Following A Trail of Digital Geopolitics<\/a> (2020) by David J. Blake<\/a><\/p>\n

(1) Another well-known Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council is Eliot Higgins, founder of the Bellingcat group, which apparently serves as a civilian front organization of British military intelligence and was involved in psychological operations<\/a> both in Ukraine and the Syria war<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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CrowdStrike founder and Atlantic Council Senior Fellow, Dmitri Alperovitch, in 2016 (Esquire<\/a>)
\n<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Swiss Policy Research, founded in 2016, is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit research group investigating geopolitical propaganda in Swiss and international media. SPR is composed of independent academics that<\/em> for personal and professional reasons prefer to protect their identities,<\/em> and receives no external funding; t<\/em>here are no financial sponsors or backers. <\/em>Our articles have been published or shared by numerous independent media outlets and journalists, among them Julian Assange<\/a>, and have been translated into more than two dozen languages.<\/em><\/p>\n

See also:<\/em><\/h4>\n