Let me save you from further humility, @Maddow. Although even Snopes says this allegation is unproven, you’ll still continue to push another of your brainless conspiracy theories based on unproven, unconfirmed reports snopes.com/fact-check/tru…
The independent research done by the unnamed “community of malware hunters” purportedly commenced in mid-2016, shortly after rumors about Russian interference in that year’s election began circulating.
What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations.
Much of the content of the Slate piece came from persons unable or unwilling to disclose their identities and credentials (and were therefore unavailable for questions), but it wasn’t long before cybersecurity expert Robert Graham of Errata Security tackled the claims.
In a more concise and far less speculative blog post, Graham cast reams of doubt on the entire claim set and noted that a hotel marketing management company (Cendyn), not Trump, controlled the domains in question.
When you view this “secret” server in context, surrounded by the other email servers operated by Listrak on behalf of Cendyn, it becomes more obvious what’s going on … It’s Cendyn that registered and controls the trump-email.com domain, as seen in the WHOIS information.
That the Trump Organization is the registrant, but not the admin, demonstrates that Trump doesn’t have direct control over it .
When the domain information was changed last September 23, it was Cendyn who did the change, not the Trump Organization. This link lists a bunch of other hotel-related domains that Cendyn likewise controls, some Trump related, some related to Trump’s hotel competitors.
That this is just normal marketing business from Cendyn and Listrak is the overwhelming logical explanation for all this. People are tempted to pull nefarious explanations out of their imaginations for things they don’t understand (like Maddow).
But for those of us with experience in this sort of thing, what we see here is a normal messed up marketing (aka. spam) system that the Trump Organization doesn’t have control over.
Knowing who owns and controls these servers, it’s unreasonable to believe that Trump is using them for secret emails. Far from “secret” or “private” servers as Hillary claims, these servers are wide open and obvious.
Graham concluded by noting that experts consulted by Slate offered piecemeal confirmations, none adding up to a whole.
But the article quotes several experts confirming the story, so how does that jibe with this blog post. The answer is that none of the experts confirmed the story.
Read more carefully. None of the identified experts confirmed the story.
Read more carefully. None of the identified experts confirmed the story.
Instead, the experts looked at pieces, and confirmed part of the story. Vixie rightly confirmed that the pattern of DNS requests came from humans, and not automated systems. Chris Davis rightly confirmed the server doesn’t look like a normal email server.
Neither of them, however, confirmed that Trump has a secret server for communicating with the Russians. Both of their statements are consistent with what I describe above — that’s it’s a Cendyn operated server for marketing campaigns independent of the Trump Organization.
Those researchers violated their principles
The big story isn’t the conspiracy theory about Trump, but that these malware researchers exploited their privileged access for some purpose other than malware research.
The big story isn’t the conspiracy theory about Trump, but that these malware researchers exploited their privileged access for some purpose other than malware research.
