Tag Archives: guccifer

FBI Now Pretty Sure Russia Is Behind Anti-Clinton Hacking

Mother Jones

The Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI is increasingly convinced that the recent hacks of the DNC and other organizations are being led by Russia:

A fuller picture of the operation has come into focus in the past several weeks. U.S. officials believe that at least two hacking groups with ties to the Russian government, known as Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, are involved in the escalating data-theft efforts, according to people briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of the cyberattacks.

Following successful breaches, the stolen data are apparently transferred to three different websites for publication, these people say. The websites—WikiLeaks, DCLeaks.com and a blog run by Guccifer 2.0—have posted batches of stolen data at least 42 times from April to last week.

WikiLeaks has published U.S. secrets for years but has recently taken an overtly adversarial tone toward Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Cybersecurity experts believe that DCLeaks.com and Guccifer 2.0 often work together and have direct ties to Russian hackers.

Most of these leaks have been designed to hurt Hillary Clinton, who Vladimir Putin apparently hates. Meanwhile, Trump advisor Carter Page has left the Trump campaign over accusations that he’s a little too chummy with the folks in Russia responsible for all this hacking. Page says the whole thing is ridiculous, but apparently his erstwhile friends in Trumpland are throwing him under the bus anyway:

The Trump campaign has been distancing itself from Page. Although Page was one of Trump’s originally announced foreign policy advisers, campaign manager KellyAnne Conway told CNN on Sunday that Page is not really involved at with the campaign at this point.

I have not spoken with him at all, in fact, meaning he’s not part of our national security or foreign policy briefings that we do now at all, certainly not since I have become campaign manager,” she said….Other Trump campaign sources told me that Page was never really part of Trump’s inner circle….Page has never met with Trump one on one and hasn’t been deeply involved in Trump foreign policy speeches or events, they said.

So…he was just some guy whose name they used so they’d look like they had some advisors. Apparently they’d rather publicly fess up to lying about their campaign announcements than take a chance that Page might become a liability. What nice folks.

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FBI Now Pretty Sure Russia Is Behind Anti-Clinton Hacking

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This Is How We Know Congress Isn’t Really Serious About Election Fraud

Mother Jones

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The debate over possible Russian meddling in US elections was a major theme in a US House hearing Tuesday on protecting the 2016 elections from cyberattacks and machine-voting attacks. Even though election preparations have been underway for months around the country and early voting in many states begins soon, committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said the hearing was to review the security of the election system.

“This discussion is timely as many concerns have been raised in recent months about the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, voting over the internet, and online voter registration,” Smith said.

Concerns about the security of the US voting system have been heightened after the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and some high-profile Democratic politicians. The DNC, along with several US government officials and security research firms, have fingered Russian intelligence as responsible for the hacks of Democratic targets. Add to that the recent revelation that state election databases in Arizona and Illinois had been hacked, although the degree of success in each attack, and the ultimate purpose, remains unclear. Even though the Russian government has denied being involved, Democrats within Congress have called on the Obama administration to publicly accuse Russia of trying to interfere with US elections.

None of the witnesses—Dr. Charles Romine of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and Dr. Dan Wallach of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University—suggested Russians were attempting to hack election infrastructure, only that they, too, had received this information specific to the DNC and the DCCC from press accounts.

“The nature of the threat is that they don’t want you to see them there,” said Wallach. “So we can’t assume that if we haven’t seen them that they’re absent. What we do know is that we’ve established motive. The attack on the DNC’s email server is motive—it shows that they did it for explicit partisan purposes.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said the Russians’ goal might not necessarily be to manipulate vote counts or tamper with voter registration databases, but to create chaos in the system and undermine confidence. “The focus of this hearing is on the voting systems, but really the question is about the election,” she said. “It’s pretty clear that the Russians have attacked, have engaged, in a cyberattack on the DNC and the DCCC.”

For Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.), Russian involvement in trying to hack or access actual election systems around the country lacked any evidence. “We have seen article after article after article about how Russia is compromising the integrity of our election system, and Mr. Chairman, the panelists are just saying that is false,” Rohrbacher said. “We want our country to be safe, but we also don’t want to just continually vilify Russia and turning them into the bad guys. If we’re going to have integrity of our system, I think we have to look at home for real threats to the integrity of our voting system.”

Lofgren disagreed. “To downplay the role that the Russians have had in this is a huge mistake, when you take a look at what they did to the DNC and the DCCC,” Lofgren said, urging members to avoid making the discussion about hacking partisan. “If you attack one of the major parties, somehow that’s okay if it could be to your advantage,” she said. “I like to think if the Russians had attacked the Republican National Committee, Democrats would be as outraged as Republicans. It’s an attack on America. It’s not an attack on a party.”

The hearing came the same day that Guccifer 2.0, the hacker or hackers who have publicly taken credit for the hack of the DNC, issued a rambling statement about information security at a London cybersecurity conference where he was supposed to appear (he didn’t), according to Motherboard. Guccifer did release roughly 600 megabytes of documents containing information about DNC fundraising efforts and other Democratic planning documents at the conference, according to Politico.*

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the documents released today by the hacker Guccifer 2.0 came from a Democratic contracting firm. We regret the error.

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This Is How We Know Congress Isn’t Really Serious About Election Fraud

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I Just Texted With the DNC Hacker…

Mother Jones

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The hacker or hackers working under the pseudonym “Guccifer 2.0” released another set of documents Friday, this time posting a series of documents that appear to have been stolen from the internal Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee network. The latest dump includes personal contact information for dozens of members of Congress, along with memos related to a campaign in Florida’s 18th Congressional District, and other internal DCCC documents, and is titled “Guccifer 2.0 Hacked DCCC.”

The hacker(s)’ site had been dormant for nearly a month before the DCCC documents were posted Friday evening, and over the last several weeks multiple news outlets have cited anonymous US government officials as saying that they believe the hacks are not the work of a lone hacker—as the hacker claimed in interviews with Vice News’ Motherboard and Mother Jones, among others—rather they’re the work of Russian intelligence groups or hackers working with the Russian government in an alleged effort to divide Democrats and aid Republican nominee Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that US government officials believe the hack, which was first publicly acknowledged by the Democratic National Committee on June 14, was much wider than initially thought, and could have targeted several Democratic political organizations along with the private email accounts of more than 100 Democratic Party officials and other groups.

Shortly after the documents were released Friday, Guccifer 2.0 answered a series of questions for Mother Jones via Twitter direct messaging. Here’s our semi-casual exchange:

At that point, the hacker(s) stopped communicating with me.

The initial release of hacked documents from the DNC, and the subsequent release of nearly 20,000 DNC emails and thousands of attachments by Wikileaks, showed signs that some Democratic Party officials did not like Bernie Sanders and discussed ways to undermine his campaign. The controversy led to the resignation of then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and several other top party officials, and cast a shadow over the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The DNC later publicly apologized to Sanders for “inexcusable” behavior of those officials.

The hacker(s) included a message about US elections along with the stolen documents posted Friday: “As you see the U.S. presidential elections are becoming a farce, a big political performance where the voters are far from playing the leading role. Everything is being settled behind the scenes as it was with Bernie Sanders. I wonder what happened to the true democracy, to the equal opportunities, the things we love the United States for,” the hacker(s) wrote. “The big money bags are fighting for power today. They are lying constantly and don’t keep their word. The MSM are producing tons of propaganda hiding the real stuff behind it. But I do believe that people have right to know what’s going on inside the election process in fact.”

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I Just Texted With the DNC Hacker…

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