Photo Credit: republica

Recently, we learned that it seems authorities have identified our friend, Guccifer 2.0. The main mechanism for this is that through Guccifer 2.0’s frequent communications via Twitter and ProtonMail, on one occasion he neglected to notice he was not connected to his favorite VPN service, Elite VPN. This means authorities were able to get his actual IP address when he was communicating openly while engaging in his portion of the influence operation.

As attention turns to the cyber threats facing 2018's midterm elections, we're learning hard lessons from what went down in 2016. (Plus, what we can presumably except coming up) There were multiple aspects to my research and human intelligence operations exploring what was going on behind the scenes in 2016, but this article focuses on only one, Guccifer 2.0.

With the massive upsurge in the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, cybercriminals are turning their prime focus to cryptocurrency. One of the fastest growing forms of malware are those mining cryptocurrencies on victim machines. Specifically, using the browsers of visitors as CPU cryptocurrency miners. Even news sites are utilizing this to monetize their websites and blogs. As bitcoin often takes specialized hardware to effectively mine, criminals are turning to Monero as the mining currency of choice for victim machines.