It Would Have Been a Serious Blunder Not to Exploit Russia for the US Elections

Commenting on the recent US accusations of Russia "authorizing" the DNC hack and "meddling" in the upcoming US election, Russian information security expert Anatoly Lebedev told Sputnik that it would have been a "serious blunder" not to exploit Russia for the US elections as it is a "winning move."

"Throughout recent years the relationship between our countries remains rather tense and it would have been a serious blunder of the nominees not to use it for the presidential campaign as it is a very winning move," Anatoly Lebedev, Deputy Head of the Information Security Department of Moscow Bauman State Technical University (BMSTU) told Radio Sputnik.

While there is not a single piece of evidence proving Russia's involvement, the US presidential nominees could endlessly speculate on anyone's involvement in the cyber-attack, he added.

"There could be anyone behind these hacks. It might be the special services who are conducting surveillance. It might be independent hackers who get together via the Internet. The capacities of the university centers around the world make it possible. However we will probably only learn in many-many years what really happened," he said.

However he did not rule out that it might have been a simple breach of security rules which triggered the cyber-attack.

"As a rule, civilians and politicians don't deal with information security. It is known only too well that high officials leave secret documents in hotel rooms, for example," he said.

The people who don't work on the software don't pay too much attention to it, and so anything can happen, the expert said.

In September, the US Threat Intelligence Platform ThreatConnect claimed that Russia's web hosting service, King Servers was identified as the platform for the attack on the Democratic National Committee which resulted in a series of leaks of internal emails.

Six out of the eight IP addresses used by the hackers were allegedly hosted on King Servers.

Vladimir Fomenko, owner of the Russian hosting company told RT that he was surprised to learn from US media that his company was somehow implicated.

He also believes that the only connection to Russia the Americans really have is that the servers are located there.

"If the FBI asks, we are ready to supply the IP addresses, the logs." However, he says, "Nobody is asking… It’s like nobody wants to sort this out."

"Thinking that the criminals must likewise also be from Russia is just absurd," he added.

"No one blames Mark Zuckerberg when criminals use Facebook for their own ends? … As soon as we learnt our servers were involved, we disconnected the perpetrators from our equipment and conducted our own investigation. We have learnt certain things and are ready to share it with special services at their first call," he stated.

Fomenko however explained that it was peculiar that the FBI chose to allow news reports to spread before anything was done.

"This may have scared the criminals off, allowing them to cover their traces," he suggested.