In case you missed it, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid believes that FBI Director James Comey is deliberately sitting on “explosive information” about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Well, Slate may have stumbled on what some of that information may be. A team of malware hunters discovered a very unusual pattern of communications between a server at Trump Tower and a server at a bank with close ties to the Kremlin.
This loose network of computer scientists, who jokingly call themselves “the Union of Concerned Nerds,” started checking out Trump’s computers after word got out that Russian hackers had wormed their way into the Democratic National Committee. They suspected that the Russians could target other computers with ties to the campaign as well. As one team member put it, they felt they had to “preserve the integrity of the election.”
In late July, team member “Tea Leaves” discovered that a bank in Moscow was frequently pinging a server at Trump Tower. After circulating logs of the Trump server activity with other members of the cybersecurity world, they discovered they weren’t dealing with a hack at all. Instead, it appeared that someone in Trump Tower was emailing with someone at Alfa-Bank in Moscow, a bank on the fringes of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
To Tea Leaves and his colleagues, something about the server appeared off. Not only was it handling far less traffic than a server of its size should handle, but 87 percent of its communications were with Alfa. Additionally, it was configured in a way to keep most other traffic out.
The Union took their data to Paul Vixie, the man who wrote much of the DNS code that powers the Internet. He concluded that Trump and Alfa were definitely communicating “in a secretive fashion.” Based on his experience, it was something you would expect from “criminal syndicates,” not an American real estate company communicating with an international bank.
Vixie and other computer scientists also checked to see if the data could possibly be fake, and ruled that out. Once they confirmed the data was real, the Union plotted the data from the logs, and discovered that most of the communication spiked during major election events.
Now here’s where things really get interesting. The New York Times got wind of the story, and started chasing it down in September. However, shortly after The Times spoke with a representative of Alfa Bank in Washington on September 21, the Trump server abruptly stopped working. On September 27, a brand new host name popped up that connected to the same server via a different route. The first person to try to look up the new name? Someone at Alfa-Bank. Not long afterward, all communication between Trump and Alfa stopped.
Through a spokesman, Alfa denies any “special or secret Internet connection” with Trump–even though the data suggests otherwise. The Trump campaign also denied any relationship. However, when Slate asked why the Trump Organization renamed its server after The Times contacted Alfa, there was no response.
Seen by itself, none of this adds up. But put in context with other events, and this situation absolutely reeks. One of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers, Carter Page, has raised eyebrows with his Kremlin contacts. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was under fire for being a little too cozy with Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government. The DNC hack has been blamed on Russia–despite Comey’s refusal to sign off on the warning. And ABC has uncovered a slew of business deals between Trump and Russian interests.
That probably explains why Hillary Clinton’s campaign blasted out this message on Twitter.
It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. https://t.co/D8oSmyVAR4 pic.twitter.com/07dRyEmPjX
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016
For all the talk about Hillary’s email server, there is no evidence that she used it to secretly communicate with hostile actors. It sure looks like Trump, or someone close to him, did. Care to explain, Donald?
(featured image courtesy Jason Miller’s Twitter)
