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NYTIMES:In Ukraine, a Malware Expert Who Could Blow the Whistle on Russian Hacking

smokeymicpot

Beat EviLore at pool.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/world/europe/russia-ukraine-malware-hacking-witness.html

KIEV, Ukraine — The hacker, known only by his online alias ”Profexer," kept a low profile. He wrote computer code alone in an apartment and quietly sold his handiwork on the anonymous portion of the internet known as the Dark Web. Last winter, he suddenly went dark entirely.

Profexer's posts, already accessible only to a small band of fellow hackers and cybercriminals looking for software tips, blinked out in January — just days after American intelligence agencies publicly identified a program he had written as one tool used in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

But while Profexer's online persona vanished, a flesh-and-blood person has emerged: a fearful man who the Ukrainian police said turned himself in early this year, and has now become a witness for the F.B.I.

”I don't know what will happen," he wrote in one of his last messages posted on a restricted-access website before going to the police. ”It won't be pleasant. But I'm still alive."

It is the first known instance of a living witness emerging from the arid mass of technical detail that has so far shaped the investigation into the D.N.C. hack and the heated debate it has stirred. The Ukrainian police declined to divulge the man's name or other details, other than that he is living in Ukraine and has not been arrested.

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.

Profexer was not arrested because his activities fell in a legal gray zone, as an author but not a user of malware, the Ukrainian police say. But he did know the users, at least by their online handles. ”He told us he didn't create it to be used in the way it was," Mr. Demediuk said.

A member of Ukraine's Parliament with close ties to the security services, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the interaction was online or by phone and that the Ukrainian programmer had been paid to write customized malware without knowing its purpose, only later learning it was used in the D.N.C. hack.

”It was the first strike," Mr. Zhora said of the earlier hack of Ukraine's electoral computers. Ukraine's Cyber Police have also provided the F.B.I. with copies of server hard drives showing the possible origins of some phishing emails targeting the Democratic Party during the election.
 

RCSI

Member
LTTP on this link to a Trump tweet, but:

After lying dormant for many months, Cyber Berkut jumped back into action this summer just as multiple investigations in Washington into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow shifted into high gear. Cyber Berkut released stolen emails that it and Russian state news media said had exposed the real story: Hillary Clinton had colluded with Ukraine.
 
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