Guccifer Unmasked?

The Daily Beast is reporting that Guccifer 2.0, the lone hacker who took credit for providing Wikileaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU).

As the Daily Beast observes, the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would “cross the Kremlin threshold” — and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.

The identification came about as a result of Guccifer’s failure to activate a VPN client before logging, thereby leaving a Moscow-based IP address in the server logs of an American social media company.

Working from the IP address, U.S investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s HQ on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow.

As Daily Beast explains, this is a breakthrough because Guccifer had sprung into existence on June 15, 2016, after a computer security firm tied Russia to an intrusion at the Democratic National Committee. The Guccifer persona had identified themselves as an “independent Romanian hacktivist who’d breached the DNC on a lark.”

Guess we’ll have to wait and see what special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has to say about that provenance.

Meanwhile, back here in these United States, online classified site Craigslist has pulled its entire personal ad section after Congress passed a new sex trafficking bill that puts more liability on websites.

Craigslist said it couldn’t afford the risk of continuing the host personal ads:

US Congress just passed

HR 1865, “FOSTA”

, seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully. Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back someday. To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!

And it wasn’t just Craigslist… Reddit has also banned certain subreddits, with several less well-known sites also having ended their personal sections.

The name of the bill was H.R.1865, or the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or “FOSTA.”