On Sunday I asked who was crying wolf — JP Morgan itself, or Mike Rogers — about the claimed JP Morgan attack that might not be a serious attack at all and had been attributed to Russia without yet proof of that.

So who should crawl out of his sinecure but Keith Alexander?

Keith Alexander, the NSA director from 2005 until last March, said he had no direct knowledge of the attack though it could have been backed by the Russian government in response to sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU over the crisis in Ukraine.

“How would you shake the United States back? Attack a bank in cyberspace,” said Alexander, a retired U.S. Army general who has started his own cybersecurity company to sell services to U.S. banks. “If it was them, they just sent a real message: ‘You’re vulnerable.’”

[snip]

The hackers who attacked JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank, were “a group with exceptional skills or a nation-state backed group,” Alexander said in an interview yesterday at Bloomberg’s Washington bureau.

[snip]

“If you wanted to send a message, do you think that was significant enough for the U.S. government to say one of the best banks that we have from a cybersecurity perspective was infiltrated by somebody?” Alexander asked. “And if they could get in to do that, even if they never use it, they could get in and collapse it. Does that cause you concern?”

Note how Alexander admits he has no personal knowledge of the attack but then opines about the skills of the hackers and goes from there to hypothesize how this was a response from Russia?

So maybe it wasn’t JP Morgan or Mike Rogers crying wolf. It sure looks like Alexander is willingly feeding the poorly evidenced claims about this hack.

But don’t worry, Keith Alexander doesn’t have a conflict of interest at all.