More analysis of the fake bullshit...
Errata Security: Debunking Trump's "secret server"
Debunking Trump's "secret server"
According to
this Slate article, Trump has a secret server for communicating with Russia. Even Hillary has piled onto this story.
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It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.
http://slate.me/2dWggCd
11:32 PM - 31 Oct 2016
This is nonsense. The evidence available on the Internet is that Trump neither (directly) controls the domain "trump-email.com", nor has access to the server. Instead, the domain was setup and controlled by Cendyn, a company that does marketing/promotions for hotels, including many of Trump's hotels. Cendyn outsources the email portions of its campaigns to a company called Listrak, which actually owns/operates the physical server in a data center in Philidelphia.
Trump's response is (minus the political bits) likely true, supported by the evidence. It's the conclusion I came to even before seeing the response.
When you view this "secret" server in context, surrounded by the other email servers operated by Listrak on behalf of Cendyn, it becomes more obvious what's going on. In the same Internet address range of Trump's servers you see a bunch of similar servers, many named
[client]-email.com. In other words,
trump-email.com is not intended as a normal email server you and I are familiar with, but as a server used for marketing/promotional campaigns.
It's Cendyn that registered
and who controls the
trump-email.com domain, as seen in the WHOIS information. That the Trump Organization is the registrant, but not the admin, demonstrates that they don't have
direct control over it.
When the domain information was changed last September 23, it was Cendyn who did the change, not the Trump Organization. This
link lists a bunch of other hotel-related domains that Cendyn likewise controls, some Trump related, some related to Trump's hotel competitors, like Hyatt and Sheraton.
Cendyn's claim they are reusing the server for some other purpose is likely true. If you are an enterprising journalist with $399 in your budget, you can find this out. Use the website
http://reversewhois.domaintools.com/ to get a complete list of the 641 other domains controlled by Cendyn, then do an MX query for each one to find out which of them is using
mail1.trump-email.com as their email server.
This is why we can't have nice things on the Internet. Investigative journalism is dead. The Internet is full of clues like this if only somebody puts a few resources into figuring things out. For example, organizations that track spam will have information on exactly which promotions this server has been used for in the recent past. They should have a copy of all Trump-related promotions. Those who operate public DNS resolvers, like Google's 8.8.8.8, OpenDNS, or Dyn, may have knowledge which domain was related to
mail1.trump-email.com. Indeed, one journalist
did call one of them, and found other people queried this domain than the two listed in the Slate story -- debunking it.
And so on and so forth -- there's a lot of information out there if we just start digging.
Conclusion
The response from the Trump campaign is overwhelmingly the most logical explanation. Trump hotel businesses outsourced marketing campaigns to Cendyn, who created the domain and setup (through Listrak) the servers. It's Cendyn who controls the servers, and not the Trump campaign. It's unbelievable that the Trump campaign would even have access to those servers, much less be using them. Far from being "secret" or "private", this servers are wide open and obvious.
But experts say...
But the article quotes several experts confirming the story, so how does that jibe with this blog post. The answer is that none of the experts confirmed the story.
Read more carefully. None of the identified experts confirmed the story. Instead, the experts looked at pieces, and confirmed part of the story. Vixie rightly confirmed that the pattern of DNS requests came from humans, and not automated systems. Chris Davis rightly confirmed the server doesn't look like a normal email server.
Neither of them, however, confirmed that Trump has a secret server for communicating with the Russians. Both of their statements are consistent with what I describe above -- that's it's a Cendyn operated server for marketing campaigns independent of the Trump Organization.