Talk:Fancy Bear

Name origin

Where does the name come from? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.105.239.226 (talk) 00:18, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

It seems to have been coined by one of the cybersecurity firms whose clients are often exposed to state-run hacking teams. "Bear" is probably a reference to the Russian Federation but it doesn't seem obvious where "Fancy" came from, although sources say that they have some very sophisticated custom malware. If somebody has sources giving the origin of the name, we should put that in the article. Geogene (talk) 00:42, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

I've read that it is shorthand for the FSB (FanSy Bear). Ericoides (talk) 13:59, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

@76.105.239.226: The name is derived from the coding system that Dmitri Alperovitch uses for hacker groups. "Bear" is for Russians. Fancy refers to "Sofacy" a word in the malware that reminded the analyst who found it of Iggy Azalea's song "Fancy". [1] gobonobo ^{+ c} 05:04, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

CrowdStrike's Dmitri Alperovitch should not be used as an authoritative source on the origin of the name Fancy Bear without more documentation for his claim. Alperovitch's strong links to the (USA) Democratic party, and his company's retraction of the key claims of Russian hacking of the Ukraine military's artillery systems late in 2016--explicitly used as supporting evidence of CrowdStrike's conclusion the DNC hack was by Russia--and the recent metadata analysis sponsored by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published in The Nation that concluded the DNC emails could not have been a hack, but rather was a leak (files copied locally, not hacked remotely) casts any statement he might make on the subject of hacking less than authoritative. The sentence needs to be reworded to clearly indicate Alperovitch's story of the name origin is an unsubstantiated claim, or provide independent corroborating sources. Publicity-seeking entrepreneurs have been known to tell a few tall tales and to claim credit where credit is not due.

- https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/23/cybersecurity-firm-that-attributed-dnc-hacks-to-russia-may-have-fabricated-russia-hacking-in-ukraine/ --Jimmyb10 (talk) 05:44, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Recent NYTimes article

Here's a recent article from the nytimes on the DNC hacks. Note - I was trying to find some info on the State Department hacks mentioned in this Wikipedia article or others.. Is there any sources that can be used regarding this?

- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?_r=0

"But in 2014 and 2015, a Russian hacking group began systematically targeting the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Each time, they eventually met with some form of success,” Michael Sulmeyer, a former cyberexpert for the secretary of defense, and Ben Buchanan, now both of the Harvard Cyber Security Project, wrote recently in a soon-to-be published paper for the Carnegie Endowment.

The Russians grew stealthier and stealthier, tricking government computers into sending out data while disguising the electronic “command and control” messages that set off alarms for anyone looking for malicious actions. The State Department was so crippled that it repeatedly closed its systems to throw out the intruders. At one point, officials traveling to Vienna with Secretary of State John Kerry for the Iran nuclear negotiations had to set up commercial Gmail accounts just to communicate with one another and with reporters traveling with them."

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Shaded0 (talk • contribs) 18:58, 14 December 2016 (UTC)