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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (1010960)	4/11/2017 6:33:30 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574309

Someone else said that awhile ago and mistakenly agreed with that point. But a little checking shows that's not true. Hillary Clinton and her campaign have sought to cast doubt on the authenticity of thousands of emails leaked by WikiLeaks showing the inner workings of Clinton’s campaign. It’s not just that they came from Russian hackers in an attempt to meddle in the U.S. election. But also that they might have been doctored. Vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine raised the possibility Sunday in an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. .............. Kaine later added: "The one (email) that has referred to me was flat-out completely incorrect. So I don’t know whether it was doctored or whether the person sending it didn’t know what they were talking about. Clearly, I think there’s a capacity for much of the information in them to be wrong." ........... Experts told PolitiFact that there is precedent to support Kaine’s claim. While most of the emails are probably unaltered, they said there is a chance that at least a few have been tampered with in some way. "I've looked at a lot of document dumps provided by hacker groups over the years, and in almost every case you can find a few altered or entirely falsified documents," said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of cybersecurity firm Taia Global. "But only a few. The vast majority were genuine. I believe that's the case with the Podesta emails, as well." "I would be shocked if the emails weren't altered," said Jamie Winterton, director of strategy for Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative, citing Russia’s long history of spreading disinformation. Experts pointed to the Democratic National Committee email hack that happened earlier this year. Metadata from the stolen and leaked documents showed the hackers had edited documents. For example, hackers were kicked out of the DNC network June 11, yet among their documents is a file that was created on June 15, found Thomas Rid, a war studies professor at King’s College London. A few weeks later, Guccifer 2.0, the hacker believed to have Russian ties, released documents supposedly stolen from the Clinton Foundation. But security analysts reviewed the documents and found that they actually came from the DNC hacks, not the foundation. And some of the information was likely fabricated, like a folder conspicuously titled "Pay to Play." In massive document dumps like the Podesta email leak, the risk of encountering altered documents is heightened because it’s easy to slip them in among thousands of genuine documents, said Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Institution fellow and former lawyer for the National Security Agency. "It is possible the WikiLeaks dump of Podesta’s emails includes forged or altered documents," Hennessey said. "With any large leak, it is wise to proceed with caution and skepticism and verify the authenticity of documents before reporting." ............. Well-known hacker Robert Graham verified the email’s digital signature, a tool email providers use to confirm that an email actually came from the provider’s server without alteration. These digital signatures are embedded in the raw sources available on the WikiLeaks website and can be used to "concretely prove that many of the emails in the Wikileaks dump are undoctored," said cybersecurity consultant Matt Tait. However, some of the emails in the WikiLeaks dump — especially among emails sent to Podesta — don’t have these signatures and can’t be technically verified. And digital signature verification wouldn’t detect tampering by omission, like if the hackers were to withhold certain emails. "Therefore my conclusion remains the same: Tim Kaine is at least partially wrong here," Tait said. "We know for sure that John Podesta was hacked, and we know for sure that many of his real emails have been published via Wikileaks. But his caution isn't entirely unfair." ............. politifact.com