For those of you curious about how we do computer forensic work, here’s a short video that explains how we know that the DNC email leaks during the presidential election were an inside job.
I admit that I receive darn little training for my computer tech support ministry. It began as a driving need to write and publish back in the old DOS days. It was by far better than scribbling or typing on paper and was easily the best way to keep track of documents and notes. My interest in the Internet was long delayed until I discovered all that background resources that were hosted out there.
Along that path, I ran into some troubles not of my own making, and ended up getting harassed online by government agents. They even hacked my computers in a vain attempt to find evidence that didn’t exist. They were trying to rope me into a case in which I had no involvement at all. Learning how to counter that harassment is where I learned so much about computer forensics.
Along the way, I learned how Open Source tools seldom did things that betrayed you, and could often help you sniff out things that could betray you in documents created by proprietary software. I learned how to read meta-data in all kinds of files, and how to read email headers. The information there tells way more than you might imagine. You can look up the term “meta-data” in conjunction with the name of your software and learn how to modify or remove it. While it isn’t common knowledge, you would expect people who work in tech support to know this stuff.
Oddly, the man named in the video as the source of the “Guccifer 2.0” DNC leaks was an IT guy, someone who should have known his name was in the meta-data, but that’s not something taught in the mainstream IT schools. And to be honest, it could have been planted there, but that’s highly unlikely.
One more note: When Motherboard news interviewed the DNC leaker, it was clear this fellow didn’t know Romanian language that well, yet claimed to be Romanian. And it’s hard to imagine anyone living in Romania who doesn’t recognize Russian language, not to mention probably reading it well enough to get by.
Cynicism is a gift from God. Politics is full of deception on all sides.
