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Email and the 2016 Presidential Election


Just a few more days until the election, and then everybody can calm down and get back to their normal lives, I hope.

Every time I read the Washington Post, I see another article about email servers or weird DNS server activity. It's tiring.

I don't have the strength or energy to debate folks about the Hillary Clinton email server saga, so I'll just link back to this Word to the Wise post from July where Steve Atkins quotes Lane Winree on how plausible the explanation for the HRC email server scenario actually was. I do personally find it quite plausible. Of course, some commenters disagree, but security best practices aren't a monolith now, nor were they then.

Then there's this whole question of whether or not a Trump owned/managed server was communicating with a Russian bank. One of the people quoted in the Salon article is Paul Vixie. I worked for Paul around 15 years ago. We're not friends, but I generally think of him as a smart guy. Unfortunately, the more I read about this, the more it smells like this was probably just an email service provider running a dedicated outbound email server for marketing campaigns for some business of Trump's. The traffic could just be "typical ESP stuff" -- click tracking connections, image hosting lookups, performing DNS-based authentication checks, etc. and I could pretty much see a few really smart DNS nerds getting confused and thinking something more nefarious was afoot. I think the folks at the Intercept probably agree with me.

So, little to see on one hand and nothing to see on the other. Back to work, everyone.

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