“That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate ,” DNS expert Paul Vixie told Foer. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server.” “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. “When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random,” Foer wrote.
The researchers concluded that the new domain enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. Odder still, four days later the Trump Organization created a new host - and the very first DNS lookup to that new domain came from servers at Alfa Bank. Foer noted that roughly two days after Lichtblau shared the DNS data with B.G.R., the Trump Organization email server domain vanished from the Internet - its domain effectively decoupled from its Internet address.įoer wrote that The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign about the DNS data when the Trump email domain suddenly went offline. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” which stated that the FBI “ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like marketing email or spam,” that might explain the unusual DNS connections.īut that same day, Slate’s Franklin Foer published a story based on his interactions with the researchers. Lichtblau’s reporting on the DNS findings ended up buried in an Octostory titled “ Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. 21, 2016, Lichtblau reportedly shared the DNS data with B.G.R., a Washington lobbying firm that worked with Alfa Bank. The bureau asked him to hold the story because publishing might disrupt an ongoing investigation. The researchers said they couldn’t be sure what kind of communications between those servers had caused the DNS lookups, but concluded that the data would be extremely difficult to fabricate.Īs recounted in this 2018 New Yorker story, New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau met with FBI officials in late September 2016 to discuss the researchers’ findings. DNS lookups from Alfa Bank constituted the majority of those requests. 14, 2021 shows the top sources of traffic to the Trump Organization email server over a four month period in the spring and summer of 2016. Scrutinizing the Trump Organization’s online footprint, the researchers determined that for several months during the spring and summer of 2016, Internet servers at Alfa Bank in Russia, Spectrum Health in Michigan, and Heartland Payment Systems in New Jersey accounted for nearly all of the several thousand DNS lookups for a specific Trump Organization server (). The DNS strangeness was first identified in 2016 by a group of security experts who told reporters they were alarmed at the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, and grew concerned that the same attackers might also target Republican leaders and institutions. Sometimes the metadata generated by these lookups can be used to identify or infer persistent network connections between different Internet hosts. Many different entities capture and record this DNS data as it traverses the public Internet, allowing researchers to go back later and see which Internet addresses resolved to what domain names, when, and for how long. Whenever an Internet user gets online to visit a website or send an email, the user’s device sends a query through the Domain Name System. The data at issue refers to communications traversing the Domain Name System (DNS), a global database that maps computer-friendly coordinates like Internet addresses (e.g., 8.8.8.8) to more human-friendly domain names (). Rather, it claims that the data they found was the result of a “highly sophisticated cyberattacks against it in 20” intended “to fabricate apparent communications” between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. That report is now public, ironically thanks to a pair of lawsuits filed by Alfa Bank, which doesn’t directly dispute the information collected by the researchers. Senate Armed Services Committee on data that prompted those experts to seek out the FBI has been limited to a handful of Senate committee leaders, Alfa Bank, and special prosecutors appointed to look into the origins of the FBI investigation on alleged ties between Trump and Russia. Since 2018, access to an exhaustive report commissioned by the U.S.
The first page of Alfa Bank’s 2020 complaint.
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