Cyber Security expert and founder of the anti-virus software McAfee, and MGT Capital Investments CEO John McAfee firmly believes Russia wasn’t involved in the Democratic National Committee, hereinafter DNC, hack.
According to the Joint Analysis Report released by the FBI, the group of cyber criminals that allegedly hacked the DNC used various locations apart from Russia to breach the DNC’s servers. In fact, the majority of IP addresses listed in the report were traced all over the world outside of Russia.
By the variety of IP address traces alone, McAfee states that the group of hackers faked their location and eliminated any branches of data that could have linked back to them. It is more likely that a third party organization or group initiated the attack to create controversy involving the Russian government.
McAfee said in an interview with Larry King:
“If I was the Chinese and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it, I would use the Russian language within the code, I would use Russian techniques of breaking into the organization. There simply is no way to assign a source for any attack.”
What the government should really be concerned about
Whether it was the Russians or independent hacking groups from all over the world that hacked the DNC isn’t necessarily important. In actuality, it is more urgent to evaluate the vulnerability of the IT infrastructure and the poor security measures of government-owned platforms.
As of late, the United States government and its investigators are allocating their resources solely to unraveling the faces behind the hacking. Less time has been spent on analyzing how the DNC was hacked in the first place and if the government can develop resilience towards similar types of attacks in the future.
Cases like the DNC hack are pushing the demand for non-backdoorable and decentralized technologies, wherein information is securely kept, transferred in a decentralized ecosystem and processed efficiently.
The reliance and dependence on central servers to store any type of data can easily expose important information to sophisticated hacking attacks or data breaches.
As a response to various controversial cases stemming from manipulation of data banks and financial institutions are increasingly testing Blockchain technology to process transactions securely.