Clinton Plugs Another Weak Story About Trump’s Ties to Putin

[eznutz]

With the polls tightening, and the unexpected announcement that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still looking into her e-mails, it was perhaps inevitable that Hillary Clinton would strike out at Donald Trump by raising his alleged connection with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. But her latest attack has little basis in fact.

On Oct. 31, Slate published a story by Franklin Foer, suggesting that the Trump Organization maintained a server whose purpose was to communicate with two servers at Alfa Bank, a financial institution in Moscow. The story described Alfa as a possible Kremlin front and cited a “Union of Concerned Nerds” -- anonymous techies who obtained the Trump-registered server’s logs -- along with one of the biggest names in tech, Paul Vixie, a founder of the internet, who looked at the logs and concluded something “secretive” was going on. It made much of the Trump Organization allegedly renaming the server after a New York Times reporter started asking questions (like Foer, he had been tipped off by the Concerned Nerds’ Reddit posts) and said Alfa was the first to communicate with it after the renaming.

What the Foer story lacked, however, was the most obvious explanation of the “suspicious” communication between the Trump and Alfa servers. It also failed to ask some important questions about the data upon which it was based.

Foer’s piece links to the registration record for the trump-email.com domain, which the server hosted. It names the Trump Organization as the registrant, but a different company -- Cendyn, of Boca Raton, Florida -- as the domain’s administrator. This means Trump owned, but didn’t run, trump-email.com; Cendyn did. Cendyn is a company that promotes hotels. As Rob Graham, a well-known hacker specializing in "offensive security," noted on the blog of his company, Errata Security, Cendyn had a number of similar domains for other clients in the same internet address range. The Cendyn servers send promotional e-mails, otherwise known as spam. Foer’s story mentioned that another organization that interacted with trump-email.com, Michigan-based Spectrum Health, investigated the matter and found "a small number of incoming spam marketing e-mails" about Trump hotels that had originated from Cendyn.

It’s hard to imagine Trump would use a spam server run by a third-party company that provides the same service to competing hotel chains for secret communications with Putin’s agents. No matter how suspicious that traffic could look on the surface -- if you didn’t know what Cendyn was doing -- it’s probably just junk passing back and forth across the internet.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...nother-weak-story-about-trump-s-ties-to-putin

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[Frankfooter]

The idea that Trump's server was sending junk mail to Alpha bank is incredibly lame.

The NYT asked Alpha about these communications, immediately after the Trump server was shut down. Very soon after that it was relaunched with a new IP and commenced the very same communication with Alpha only.

As Slate reported in depth, the server at Trump Headquarters apparently was designed to communicate directly with two servers at Alfa Bank while obscuring the fact that the communications were even ever occurring. Other experts who reviewed the extensive logs concurred that the communications are nearly certainly human generated and not the result of spam. Others have concluded that the logs and their date and stamps essentially also rule out the possibility they were faked or manipulated.

The New York Times, which conducted its own investigation, originally contacted Alfa Bank directly about the server, after which it was immediately shut down without explanation. Then, curiously, another server name was established by Trump Headquarters, with the very first communication again going to Alfa Bank.

http://feed.hypervocal.com/items/75582

If it was spam then they would have just shut it down altogether.
But they didn't, they shut it down and tried to hide it again.
Nobody goes to that much effort to spend spam to one target only.