Report: Hacker Set Up Russian Bank, Trump Organization to Create Illusion of Inappropriate Communications

There are those on the left who would like you to believe that President Trump has inappropriate if not illegal contacts with Russia and Mr. Putin. Not only do these allegations remain unproven, but a Russian Bank believes they are part of a political hoax designed to falsely implicate both President Trump and this Russian bank, and have pledged full cooperation with U.S. authorities in an investigation.

A Russian bank has reported to U.S. authorities that mysterious communications resumed recently between one of its computers and an email server tied to President Trump’s business empire, and it has developed evidence the new activity may be the work of a hacker trying to create a political hoax, Circa has learned.

Alfa Bank is asking the U.S. Justice Department for help solving the mystery and pledged its full cooperation.

Alfa wants U.S. authorities to help unmask a computer inside the United States that it believes has been used to launch cyberattacks spoofing the appearance of a backdoor communication channel between Moscow and America’s 45th president, according to a source directly familiar with the bank’s request.

The bank believes “these malicious attacks are designed to create the false impression that Alfa Bank has a secretive relationship with the Trump Organization,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

This is very interesting considering we have recently seen in a release from WikiLeaks claiming that software exists that enables the CIA, and by implication anyone possessing it and capable of understanding it, to hack into a computer system and leave footprints that give evidence that the hacking was accomplished by an innocent third party.

Alfa Bank has insisted since media stories began appearing last fall about the computer communications — known as Domain Name Server lookups — that it has never had a relationship to Trump or any of his companies and that any computer connections between the two parties’ computers were innocuous. The resumption of the computer pings started last month, and Alfa’s cybersecurity experts traced evidence that the activity was actually being spoofed — or hacked –through a third party from a masked computer address inside the United States, the source said.

Here’s a good analogy of what appears to have been happening.

The attacks attempted to trigger verification signals between Alfa Bank and a server associated with the Trump Organization, the source said.

The source said the spoofing attempt is equivalent to someone in the U.S. sending an empty envelope to the Trump Towers but putting on the envelope a return address in Russia, causing the Trump server to falsely return the communication back to Moscow.

So far, investigators have found no wrong-doing, but the story does take an interesting turn when identifying one of the individuals who have suggested that President Trump had inappropriate contacts with the Russians.

The computer scientists’ allegations last fall became so widespread — eventually appearing in media reports from Slate, CNN and The New York Times — that the FBI briefly investigated them. Agents concluded there was no evidence from the pings of a nefarious relationship, and that they probably were the result of routine computer behavior.

Circa reported Tuesday that one of the scientists who raised media concerns about the Trump-Russia connections was L. Jean Camp, an Indiana University researcher who made 22 donations totaling more than $1,500 to Hillary Clinton last year. She told Circa that her political donations had no bearing on her concerns about the data gathered by a loose group of colleagues who legitimately believed the connections should be investigated.

Why is that that the name “Clinton” comes up so often when matters of corruption are discussed? No doubt the failed candidate for president would claim she is a victim of a “great right-wing conspiracy,” that she identified was attacking her and her husband back during his administration. That claim is getting rather old by now.

The source said the first cyberattack detected by Alfa this year occurred on Feb. 18 from an unidentified third party connected to a U.S. internet provider that sent out suspicious DNS queries from servers in the U.S. to a Trump Organization server. The unidentified individual or individuals made it look as though these queries originated from variants of MOSCow.ALFAintRa.nET. As a result, the DNS responses from the Trump server were returned incorrectly to Alfa Bank’s server, which triggered Alfa Bank’s automated security.

Soon after, news media reports began making new inquiries to Alfa Bank about the old allegations from last fall. Similar new spoofing attacks were detected again on March 11 and 13, the source said.

Somebody is playing games in at attempt to discredit President Trump or worse. Now that the illegal actions have been identified, the question remains as to who this individual or organization is and whether they will get caught.

Source: Circa