| What? Child porn was found on your computer? That is a shame. |
Hacking is not only a good way to get real information, like the emails of the D.N.C., but a relatively easy and usually untraceable way to plant fake information. For example, when unidentified hackers last year broke into the computers of a government research center in Lithuania, they stole nothing, but planted bogus reports on its website that the country’s stoutly pro-American president had worked as an escort and K.G.B. informer while a student in Leningrad during the Soviet era.
A similar break-in affecting the Lithuanian military’s website replaced a bland announcement about a coming NATO exercise with a fake statement that presented the exercise as part of a plan to annex Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea, and join it with Lithuania, a member of NATO.
The supposed NATO plan outlined in the phony text closely mimicked methods used by Moscow in 2014 to annex Crimea and stir up unrest in eastern Ukraine, including the seizure of military posts and police stations and calls for the establishment of the Kaliningrad People’s Republic.
Written in faulty Lithuanian, the statement was “immediately obvious as a fake,” said Rimtautas Cerniauskas, the director of Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Center, which was set up last year in response to increased alarm over Russian aggression.
But, he added, the stunt nonetheless succeeded in distracting cyberdefense staff members from their normal work for days and in spreading a lie that, though immediately exposed, polluted discussion about NATO.
But that is not the extent of it:
This blurring of all boundaries between truth and falsehood in the service of operational needs has created a climate in Russia in which even the most serious and grotesque accusations, like those involving pedophilia, are simply a currency for settling scores.
Much of this article talks about the Russians hacking computers to place child pornography on its hard drive and even send those photos and videos to other sites that then will lead back to their victim's computer.
This should send a chill right up the spine of journalists and opponents of Putin's puppet president here in the US as to the kinds of tactics that might be directed there way if they make life too hard for Comrade Trump.
It also might explain just how Donald Trump became a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
Just something to think about.
