title: DESPERATE DEMS? RUSSIAN BANK Reports Computer Hacks Designed To Make It Appear Trump Had Secret Relationship With Them
text: A Russian bank has reported to U.S. authorities that mysterious communications resumed recently between one of its computers and an email server tied to President Trump s business empire, and it has developed evidence the new activity may be the work of a hacker trying to create a political hoax, Circa has learned.Alfa Bank is asking the U.S. Justice Department for help solving the mystery and pledged its full cooperation.Alfa wants U.S. authorities to help unmask a computer inside the United States that it believes has been used to launch cyberattacks spoofing the appearance of a backdoor communication channel between Moscow and America s 45th president, according to a source directly familiar with the bank s request.The bank believes  these malicious attacks are designed to create the false impression that Alfa Bank has a secretive relationship with the Trump Organization,  the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.Alfa Bank has insisted since media stories began appearing last fall about the computer communications   known as Domain Name Server lookups   that it has never had a relationship to Trump or any of his companies and that any computer connections between the two parties  computers were innocuous. The resumption of the computer pings started last month, and Alfa s cybersecurity experts traced evidence that the activity was actually being spoofed   or hacked  through a third party from a masked computer address inside the United States, the source said.  For entire story: Circa NewsIn November of 2016, The Intercept published a piece refuting a Slate article that attempted to convince readers there was a connection between Trump and the Alfa Bank servers: Slate s Franklin Foer published a story that s been circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime, an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an explosive night of Twitter confusion and misinformation.The gist of the Slate article is dramatic   incredible, even: Cybersecurity researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia s largest privately-held commercial bank. This is a story that any reporter in our election cycle would drool over, and drool Foer did:The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server look-ups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation   conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.These claims are based entirely on  DNS logs,  digital records of when one server looks up how to contact another across the internet. The logs, first gathered by an anonymous researcher going by the moniker  Tea Leaves  (an irony that should be lost on no one) and shared with a small group of academics, were provided to The Intercept and a handful of other news organizations. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, the Daily Beast, and Vice all examined these materials to at least some extent and did not publish the claims.You can think of DNS like a phone book that maps people s names to their phone numbers. For example, every time Alice wants to call Bob, she first looks up Bob s phone number in the phone book, and then she dials the number into her phone. However, it s possible that Alice might look up Bob s phone number and not call him on the phone. It s even possible that she might look up Bob s phone number over and over on a regular basis, over the course of months, without actually calling him. The DNS look-ups that The Intercept and others (including Slate) reviewed are similar to records of Alice looking up Bob s phone number in the phone book, but to call that evidence of sinister collusion between the two is, politely, a stretch. These DNS records alone simply cannot prove that any specific messages were sent at those times. In fact, they can t really prove anything at all, and certainly not  communication  between Trump and Alfa. This cannot be overstated: No one, not Tea Leaves, not his academic peers, and not Franklin Foer, can show that a single message was exchanged between Trump and Alfa.For entire story go to: The Intercept 