Talk:Shaltai Boltai

Regarding this mainpage item, Fancy Bear Exposed-the People Behind the Hacking Group - George Eliason, Washington's Blog, June 5, 2018. It is hard to read with its annoying 'investitatement' style, so I just glanced through maybe missing the points.

1. Surkov hack. I thought those reports were fake. But apparently they were not, producing some low value, high volume scoop. Nothing in the linked source stands out as clearly impossible.

2. Who hacked Surkov? I am not quite getting it from this very long and loose presentation. Cyber hunta and/or Shaltai Boltai, in any mix of the two, seems plausible.

3. It (something) was hacked with Fancy Bear tools and thus Cyber Hunta is Fancy Bear? It is an interesting idea, but at the moment I am not buying this. Fancy bear emerged doing hacks on Western athletes after the Russian doping scandal. Attributing this activity to Ukraine, even with the purpose of creating credibility for later use, seems to be going a bit too far (though of course not ruled out by anything fundamental). If (if!) Fancy Bear is GRU, there is no fundamental reason why they would not occasionally send dirt on Surkov to media; hardliners are not exactly happy with Surkov, who is becoming a proverbial scapegoat/punchbag of sort. I am not aware of anything in the Surkov leak which we did not 'know' already anyway, so it is indeed a stink bomb, not a shocker. 'Anybody' could do it --I have no idea why exactly Fancy Bear shows up in the picture at all. --Resup (talk) 06:40, 25 June 2018 (UTC)