Am I the only one who would like to see cold hard evidence for these claims? I want server logs, ip traces, intercepts, or some proof besides just "intelligence says".
I would too, but consider what you are asking for. Text logs. Easily fakeable text logs. If they provided an excel spreadsheet with a bunch of Russian IPs on it, what do you really do with that? In this case they are just saying "look, you'll just have to trust us on this one.."
I firmly believe that in many of these attribution cases there is a lot of top secret source discovery methods they cannot mention, like sniffers on routers, or implants on the actual computer used to send the message.
EDIT: Additionally, it's pretty unlikely that you'd see a Russian IP address and be like "Oh Russia did it". Instead, NSA would have a list of IPs known to be compromised by Russian actors. If they shared that list with the public, it would not help clear things up for us, because we don't know the history of the traffic coming from that compromised box, it could be in another country and idiots would point and say "See! Not Russia!". And it would reveal to the Russians that we knew they owned that box. All bad things.
From what I can see there are two bits of evidence other than IP logs:
1. Russian metadata on some of the files was added, implying it came from (I believe) a known Russian government actor.
2. The timing of the attacks match that of business workdays in Russia, including a cessation of attacks during official holidays.
Now, if we were talking about a hack of NORAD or something , i.e. a hard target, where the pool of actors that are likely to be successful at hacking the target is low, then this circumstantial evidence could be reasonable. The problem is that, from what we have seen so far, the DNC server and others were poorly secured. This means that the pool of potential hackers goes from "nation states" to "skript kiddies and up" and as a result, circumstantial evidence is much weaker.
> You will never see it. The US never provides proof. Only "Intel sources say" and rumors.
That's not entirely true, though the only time the US Executive Branch will provide the backing for its intelligence conclusions is if it needs to in order to convince some other entity in order to motivate that entity to take action; the public is rarely an entity which it must approach this way (and, when it must approach Congress or US Courts, there are procedures to keep intelligence material from the public, which are often, but not always, used; some information may come out this way, though), and occasionally the public will also receive some of the evidence incidentally to the US government presentation to some other entity, like the UN Security Council.
