Russian Roulette Quotes

“But, the source explained, this fit Putin’s larger strategic vision: “to destroy NATO, destroy the European Union, and seriously harm the United States.”
― Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

“One day in September 2015, FBI agent Adrian Hawkins placed a call to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., and asked to speak to the person in charge of technology. He was routed to the DNC help desk, which transferred the call to Yared Tamene, a young IT specialist with The MIS Department, a consulting firm hired by the DNC. After identifying himself, Hawkins told Tamene that he had reason to believe that at least one computer on the DNC’s network was compromised. He asked if the DNC was aware of this and what it was doing. Tamene had nothing to do with cybersecurity and knew little about the subject. He was a mid-level network administrator; his basic IT duties for the DNC were to set up computer accounts for employees and be on call to deal with any problems. When he got the call, Tamene was wary. Was this a joke or, worse, a dirty trick? He asked Hawkins if he could prove he was an FBI agent, and, as Tamene later wrote in a memo, “he did not provide me with an adequate response.… At this point, I had no way of differentiating the call I received from a prank call.” Hawkins, though, was real. He was a well-regarded agent in the FBI’s cyber squad. And he was following a legitimate lead in a case that would come to affect a presidential election. Earlier in the year, U.S. cyber warriors intercepted a target list of about thirty U.S. government agencies, think tanks, and several political organizations designated for cyberattacks by a group of hackers known as APT 29. APT stood for Advanced Persistent Threat—technojargon for a sophisticated set of actors who penetrate networks, insert viruses, and extract data over prolonged periods of time.”
― Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

“In one of the meetings, Clapper said that he was worried that Russia might respond with cyberattacks against America’s critical infrastructure—and possibly shut down the electrical grid.”
― Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

“On Saturday, March 19, 2016, at 4:34 A.M., John Podesta, the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman, received what looked like an email from Google about his personal Gmail account. “Hi John Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account,” read the email from “the Gmail Team.” It noted that the attempted intrusion had come from an IP address in Ukraine. The email went on: “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.” The Gmail Team helpfully included a link to a site where Podesta could make the recommended password change. That morning, Podesta forwarded the email to his chief of staff, Sara Latham, who then sent it along to Charles Delavan, a young IT staffer at the Clinton campaign. At 9:54 AM that morning, Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account… It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP.” Delavan later asserted to colleagues that he had committed a typo. He had meant to write that “this is not a legitimate email.” Not everybody on the Clinton campaign would believe him. But Delavan had an argument in his favor. In his response to Latham, he had included the genuine link Podesta needed to use to change his password. Yet for some reason Podesta clicked on the link in the phony email and used a bogus site to create a new password. The Russians now had the keys to his emails and access to the most private messages of Clinton World going back years.”
― Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

“One idea Daniel proposed was unusual: The United States and NATO should publicly announce a giant “cyber exercise” against a mythical Eurasian country, demonstrating that Western nations had it within their power to shut down Russia’s entire civil infrastructure and cripple its economy.”
― Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of How Vladimir Putin Attacked a U.S. Election and Shaped the Trump Presidency

“secret police had achieved “significant operational success” by inserting malware into cheap Russian IT games.”
― Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of How Vladimir Putin Attacked a U.S. Election and Shaped the Trump Presidency

“Page had been suckered. Podobnyy was a Russian intelligence officer working for the SVR, Moscow’s foreign intelligence service. He was part of a three-man spy ring that had been handed the assignment of gathering information related to potential U.S. sanctions against Russia, American efforts to develop alternative energy, and other economic topics.”
― Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of How Vladimir Putin Attacked a U.S. Election and Shaped the Trump Presidency