July 27, 2016. Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Indictment: That evening, Russian operatives targeted Hillary Clinton campaign emails “for the first time.” Read the rest

Novichok that poisoned a couple in Wiltshire came from a small bottle found in the home of one of the victims, said British police on Friday. Read the rest

As Mister Trump and his wife greeted the Queen of England, a reporter on a hot mic broke the embargo that the U.S. is indicting 12 Russian military officers with attacks on the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, and that Guccifer 2.0 and DC LEAKS were Russian intelligence missions. Read the rest

“Facebook invited me to an event today where the company aimed to tout its commitment to fighting fake news and misinformation,” wrote Oliver Darcy.

“I asked them why InfoWars is still allowed on the platform. I didn't get a good answer.” Read the rest

As early as 2014, Russian operatives working out of the Internet Research Agency (IRC) in St. Petersburg were busy creating fake Twitter accounts for U.S. local news organizations that did not exist. Read the rest

Representatives from 8 of America's largest technology companies met with U.S. intelligence officials in May to talk about how to respond to the ongoing Russian cyber-attacks and foreign influence campaigns that affected our 2016 elections, and could alter the course of year’s midterms. Read the rest

Yes, there is a Stormy Daniels impersonator. And yes, Russia is trolling us all. Read the rest

Lo, how the mighty have fallen. Read the rest

Reality Winner, 26, is the whistleblower accused of releasing an NSA document on Russia's attack on U.S. voting systems to reporters at The Intercept. Read the rest

As President Trump continues his campaign to piss off anyone who’s not a Nazi or the leader of an oppressive dictatorship, CNN is reporting that Russia may have dropped some serious coin to modernize a strategically-placed nuclear weapons storage facility. The facility is located in Kaliningrad – a wee bit of Russia all jammed up between Poland and the Baltics.

From CNN:

On Monday, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) published aerial photographs that the group says show the facility in the Baltic outpost has been under major renovation since 2016.

FAS said the images document refurbishments at the site back in 2016, when one of three underground bunkers at the location was excavated and deepened before it appeared to have been covered over in recent months, "presumably to return (to) operational status soon."

Now, here’s the fun part. Despite the fact that the bunker is designed for the secure storage and deployment of nuclear weapons for use by the Russian Air Force and Naval dual-capable forces, there’s no knowing whether it has ever stored nuclear weapons in the past or whether it will do so in the future: just because a military installation comes packing mission capabilities doesn’t mean that it has to use them. It’s the world’s shittiest shell game!

Even without the atomic weapons being packed into the Kaliningrad bunker, the joint still serves a purpose. The installation is one of the most westerly located in Russia. Upgrading it, in a manner that’s observable via areal photography or satellite imagery, provides an unspoken political message: The Russia that’s currently hosting the World Cup is the same one that invaded Ukraine in 2014, vandalized Georgia in 2008 and continues to giddily weaponize the baltic region, prompting a tactical response from NATO. Read the rest

Mark Zuckerberg himself hosted World Hack Moscow, a hackathon in October 2012, handing the mic to Facebook product manager to Simon Cross, who walked the developers through the process of using Facebook's API to gather data on a users' friends, showing them how to get "a ton of information" on the entire friend graph of a Facebook user who gave simple permissions to their apps. Read the rest

Special Counsel Robert Mueller today brings new charges against Trump's former campaign chair Paul Manafort. Also named in the Friday court filing is Manafort's longtime Russia/Ukraine business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik. Read the rest

Last April, the Kremlin ordered a ban on the private messaging app Telegram, blocking millions of IP addresses that formed Amazon and Google's clouds in order to prevent users from accessing the service; not only was it an ominous moment in the evolution of the internet as a system for oppressive control, it was also an object lesson in how internet concentration has made the internet more susceptible to censorship and control. Read the rest

This striking visual profile of a worker at the gargantuan Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works by director Evgenii Bakirov features Vladimir, The Metallurgist. The Russian title (горновой [the mountain]) is Vladimir's nickname. Read the rest

I’m starting a petition to have Arkady Babchenko henceforth referred to as "Journalism Jesus," Because holy shit, he just returned from the grave.

Less than 24 hours after it was reported that the vehemently anti-Putin journalist had died on the way to hospital after being shot in the back outside of his apartment in Kiev, Ukraine, Babchenko strolled into a press conference being thrown by the Ukrainian government, like a boss of all bosses. It seems that a hitman, hired by the Russian government to permanently silence Babchenko for the sum of $40,000, decided that instead of pulling a trigger on the contract, he’d let Ukraine’s security intelligence people in on what was supposed to be happening.

I say "supposed to," because things definitely did not go down the way that Mother Russia allegedly wanted them to.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Babchenko created a sensation in Kiev on Wednesday by appearing at a news conference, billed as a police briefing about his assassination, at which he was greeted by whoops of surprise and scattered applause. It came less than 24 hours after his wife said she had found him bleeding to death on the floor of their apartment, shot in the back.

“First of all, I would like to apologize that all of you had to live through this, because I know the horrible feeling when you have to bury your colleagues,” Mr. Babchenko, 41, told the stunned room. “Separately, I want to apologize to my wife for all the hell she had to go through.”

Holy crap. Read the rest

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

The FBI sent out an urgent bulletin advising anyone with a home or small office internet router to immediately turn it off and then turn it on again as a way to help stop the spread of a malware outbreak with origins in Russia. Read the rest

VPNFilter is a virulent, sophisticated, multistage worm that has successfully infected 500,000 home routers, leaving them vulnerable to both surveillance (the malware snoops network traffic for passwords) and region-wide internet shutdowns (VPNFilter can brick the routers it infects, and an attacker could shut down most or all of the home/small business internet access in a region by triggering this). Read the rest