Matthew Green Profile picture
I teach cryptography at Johns Hopkins. Mastodon at matthew_d_green@ioc.exchange and BlueSky at https://t.co/GI4QlxYTdk. Bluecheck not my decision ;)

Sep 17, 2021, 6 tweets

So this indictment is puzzling. It concerns Michael Sussman, a lawyer who organized the collection of DNS data from hosting providers allegedly for political purposes. Many of the companies are anonymized, can we tell who they are? (Thread) context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/def…

So we begin with “Internet Company-1”, which is a (major?) DNS resolver.

The executive in question (Tech Executive-1) claims to have been offered a position as Hillary Clinton’s cyberczar if she won, so maybe that’s a clue?

There are two other Internet companies in here. Internet Company-2 collects DNS data (maybe passively) and Internet Company-3 is maybe a threat Intel company owned by company #2. The executive has ownership interest in all three.

In case it isn’t obvious from context, this whole thread is about the Trump-Alfa Bank DNS allegations. Some of these quotes sent between researchers are pretty damning.

Overall this is an awful-looking story. The Clinton campaign and sympathetic executives at tech companies ran wild through private DNS data (which apparently has no protections at all) to concoct a narrative, and then dragged university researchers in to help confirm it.

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