Trump Tower has a direct server connection to a Russia bank

[Merneith]

Remember my thread about Donald being a Putin Patsy? Maybe I need to reconsider. Maybe Donald Trump is an active Russian agent.

A Group of Computer Scientists Believes a Trump Server Was Communicating With...

This article talks about how, while investing recent Russian hacking schemes, a group of computer scientist became aware that there was regular communication between a server located at Trump Tower and the Russian bank, Alfa.

@Slate article about the connection between Trump Tower and the 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.

<snip>

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.

Experts who have looked into the log say that it is clearly communication between real people, not bots, and it’s clearly designed to operate clandestinely.

@Slate article

Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. “It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,” Jean Camp told me. “These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.”

Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the Internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence.

The article goes on to explain how the scientists determined that the suspicious server arrangement between Trump Tower and the Alfa Bank was too sporadic to be Trump advertising spam (something that the server was used for previously, but not currently.) They also found that the timestamps on communication on the server corresponded to various political events.

@Slate article

Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.

There’s a graph in the paper illustrating all this.
Finally, the most damning part, when people started asking questions about the connection between Alfa bank and Trump Tower, the server arrangement suddenly changed:

@Slate

The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. When the scientists looked up the host, the DNS server returned a “fail” message, evidence that it no longer functioned. Or as it is technically diagnosed, it had SERVFAILed. (On the timeline above, this is the moment at the end of the chronology when the traffic abruptly spikes, as servers frantically attempt to resend rejected messages.) The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Nicholas Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”

Four days later, on September 27, the Trump organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through sms, phone, or some non-internet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”

According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold.

Obviously, Trump himself doesn’t know shit about shit, so he’s not designed the server himself. But someone at Trump Towers knows what that server connection to Alfa Bank was all about and now that someone has taken steps to hide it once again.

But whether Donald is an active agent or a stooge - either way, I hope this news brings lasting attention to his Russian connections.

[Merneith]

Hilariously, Donald gave a speech today where he slammed Hillary for being mean to Vlad, who, you might recall, Trump says he doesn’t know.

Donald Trump thanks Anthony Weiner for FBI probe, hits Hillary Clinton for...

@Donald Trump

Trump further criticized Clinton for saying “bad things” about world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and then wondering “why the world hates us.”

The real estate mogul had said much the same last week at a rally in Springfield, Ohio, where he argued Clinton “speaks very badly of Putin, and I don’t think that’s smart.”

[Bryan_Ekers]

Unfortunately, there’s a sizable overlap between “Trump voter” and “Americans who respect strong leaders like that Putin guy.”

[skdo23]

I’m not that familiar with Slate, how likely is it for one of their stories to gain traction in the MSM?

[Raygun99]

Slate is a subsidiary (at arm’s length) of the Washington Post. It is, for lack of a better definition, the mainstream media.

[Count_Blucher]

Or, for lack of a better definition, Credible Media Professionals…

[Rick_Kitchen]

There was a Russian mobster with international gambling connections operating out of Trump Tower. Could it have been his server?

[elucidator]

The bank operates under Moscow Center rules. You want to make a deposit, you go to the most eastern set of benches in Gorky Park and leave a yellow chalk mark. Come back in an hour, and if the chalk mark is gone, the meeting is off.

Real horrorshow, my droogies, horrorshow.

[eschereal]

What a bunch of amateurs. If I wanted to set up a secret pipe, I would obtain a static IPv4 address, provide that to my contact and obtain a static IP address from them as well. Once you have the static IP addresses, there are no longer any names attached to the server traffic, so the DNS lookup step is bypassed completely. Chances are they already figured this out, so the message passing has not gone silent, it is just much, much harder to spot.

[TroutMan]

@Raygun99

Slate is a subsidiary (at arm’s length) of the Washington Post. It is, for lack of a better definition, the mainstream media.

Slate is pretty liberal, on a level with Mother Jones. They are mainstream media with actual journalistic standards, but I think it will be easy to dismiss for anyone who doesn’t already believe it about Trump. I think the NYT investigation would have to go somewhere for this to gain any traction.

[John_Mace]

Trump Tower. Server. Alfa Bank. The Two Towers. Isengard, palantir, Mordor… :eek::eek::eek:

From the OP’s link (concluding paragraph):

What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations.

[gaffa]

@Rick_Kitchen

There was a Russian mobster with international gambling connections operating out of Trump Tower. Could it have been his server?

It wouldn’t correlate to the traffic increases during the Republican Convention though. Also, the server belonged to the Trump organization.

[dropzone]

@elucidator

The bank operates under Moscow Center rules.

In the day, when one of us saw a great deal that was not likely to be available tomorrow, Wife or I would invoke Moscow Rules. Putin’s people are re-experiencing that, regarding certain imports. I have in-laws there. Fuck 'em. They voted for the bastard.

[GIGObuster]

Jeepers! More Gremlins from the Kremlin!

[DigitalC]

Can we call this a Red October surprise?

[Bryan_Ekers]

If you want to fuck up the Russians, give them Afghanistan again.

[asahi]

This story is starting to blow up on Twitter and Google News.

If there’s one thing we can say is that one half of this country is going to be bitterly disgusted with the results of this election and convinced that the “winner” is barely legitimate. What a wonderful “democracy” we have now.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@asahi

If there’s one thing we can say is that one half of this country is going to be bitterly disgusted with the results of this election and convinced that the “winner” is barely legitimate. What a wonderful “democracy” we have now.

Until the election, you may as well party like it’s 1999.

[GIGObuster]

@asahi

This story is starting to blow up on Twitter and Google News.

If there’s one thing we can say is that one half of this country is going to be bitterly disgusted with the results of this election and convinced that the “winner” is barely legitimate. What a wonderful “democracy” we have now.

Meh, in reality it is the chicanery from the Republicans that tells me that a lot of what they claim about Clinton is just politics, there might be some truth to their accusations but their captain Ahab behavior makes a lot of people to support Clinton in the end.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kevin-mccarthys-truthful-gaffe/2015/09/30/f12a9fac-67a8-11e5-8325-a42b5a459b1e_story.html?utm_term=.45256a9e26cb

A comic in Something Positive said it better, ““Between 2 “evils”, I choose the competent one.””

Trump does not even get close to competent people, and that is another reason why one should not vote for him, his cabinet will be the stuff of nightmares.

[dropzone]

@Bryan_Ekers

Until the election, you may as well party like it’s 1999.

Oh, stuff it, Canuck. When you start nominating candidates who aren’t too boring to run in North Dakota, we may pay attention to you. And you’ll stop paying attention to us.