Computer nerds say Trump server has mysterious internet relations with Russian BANK! [Updated]

by SooperMexican

The Clinton machine is on Defcon 1 as they see her lead collapsing in the polls like a weak elderly pneumonia-stricken lady, and so they’re unleashing all the attacks on Trumpworld that they’ve been holding back.

This is one they’ve launched tonight:

It’s from Slate and describes how a bunch of computer nerds discovered Trump had a server set up to receive secret messages from a Russian bank:

In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.

More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server’s DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues.

…The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

The piece goes into agonizing detail about what the internet nerds discovered, but admits it’s not a smoking gun, just another mysterious piece of the Trump-Putin puzzle. During times when the election ramped up, they notice that the server had more interactions with the Russian bank, but they have no idea what those interactions are or mean.

This is the conclusion they reached:

What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump adviser whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.

I honestly can’t tell if this is a real concern or ginned up by liberals to heighten the already frightening relationship between Trump and his BFF Putin (which you can read more about here). Just today the FBI admitted that they were investigating ties between former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the Russians. So who knows? What an incredible irony that Trump would be damaged by his own secret server scandal…

Feel free to debate the issue in the comments!!

UPDATE – Some experts are expressing skepticism in the over-broad conclusion of the Slate story:

So take it with a grain of salt…


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