www.nytimes.com/…
With a little bit of help from Ukrainian cybersecurity experts and the IC, the FBI has actually found a legitimate witness to Russian hacking activities both in the US and in Ukraine and the West in general. And this guy is a supposedly renowned hacker known as “Profexer” who had authored sophisticated software that has been used extensively by Russian hackers probably under Putin’s command since at least 2014. The FBI has already interviewed this person as of an undisclosed date after the beginning of this year, which also means there is no way the NSA doesn’t also have a working copy of his entire computer and everything on it. This was a nail on the head.
In fact, Serhiy Demediuk, chief of the Ukrainian Cyber Police, said in an interview that Profexer went to the authorities himself. As the cooperation began, Profexer went dark on hacker forums. He last posted online on Jan. 9. Mr. Demediuk said he had made the witness available to the F.B.I., which has posted a full-time cybersecurity expert in Kiev as one of four bureau agents stationed at the United States Embassy there. The F.B.I. declined to comment.
. . .
Mr. Gerashchenko described the author only in broad strokes, to protect his safety, as a young man from a provincial Ukrainian city. He confirmed that the author turned himself in to the police and was cooperating as a witness in the D.N.C. investigation. “He was a freelancer and now he is a valuable witness,” Mr. Gerashchenko said.
It is not clear whether the specific malware the programmer created was used to hack the D.N.C. servers, but it was identified in other Russian hacking efforts in the United States.
The fact that this is becoming public now after having been a fact for as much as the last six months shows that the US intelligence community had not been wandering around in the dark prior to Comey’s firing setting off the chain of events that have led the FBI and Mueller to where they are now in the investigation. And furthermore, it is possibly a HUGE blow to Russian intelligence related to their hacking efforts potentially going back years, and perhaps ultimately to DJT’s twisted administration as well.