āDNC Hackerā Unmasked: He Really Works for Russia, Researchers Say
The hacker who claimed to compromise the DNC swore he was Romanian. But new research shows he worked directly for the Vladimir Putin government in Moscow. The hacker who claims to have
stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and provided them to WikiLeaks is actually an agent of the Russian government and part of an orchestrated attempt to influence U.S. media coverage surrounding the presidential election, a security research group concluded on Tuesday.
The researchers, at Arlington, Va.-based ThreatConnect, traced the self-described Romanian hacker
Guccifer 2.0 back to an Internet server in Russia and to a digital address that has been linked in the past to Russian online scams. Far from being a singly, sophisticated hacker,
Guccifer 2.0 is more likely a collection of people from the propaganda arm of the Russian government meant to deflect attention away from Moscow as the force behind the DNC hacks and leaks of emails, the researchers found. ThreatConnect is the first known group of experts to link the self-proclaimed hacker to a Russian operation, amidst an
ongoing FBI investigation and a presidential campaign rocked by the release of DNC emails that have embarrassed senior party leaders and inflamed intraparty tensions turning the Democratic National Convention. The emails revealed that party insiders plotted ways to undermine Sen. Bernie Sandersā presidential bid.
āThese are bureaucrats, not sophisticated hackers,ā Rich Barger, ThreatConnectās chief intelligence officer, told The Daily Beast. In blog posts and in interviews with journalists, Barger said, Guccifer 2.0 has made inconsistent remarks and given a version of how he penetrated the DNC networks that
technically donāt make sense. For instance, the hacker claims to have used a software flaw that didnāt exist until December 2015 in order to break into the DNC networks last summer. In an
interview with Motherboard in June, the hacker also refused to speak in Romanian, another indication that he wasnāt who he claimed to be. ThreatConnect also found that Guccifer 2.0 was attempting to mask his true location, in Russia, by communicating through an Internet service based in France. Such masking is not uncommon in government-sponsored operations, nor is it particularly difficult to accomplish. The researchers concluded that Guccifer 2.0 is actually an
āapparition created under a hasty Russian [denial and deception] campaignā to influence political events in the U.S. (The news site Vocativ was
the first to report on these conclusions, and Vocativ reporter
Kevin Collier supplied some data to the researchers.)
āMaintaining a ruse of this nature within both the physical and virtual domains requires believable and verifiable events which do not contradict one another. That is not the case here,ā the researchers wrote in a blog post. By tracing Guccifer 2.0ās Internet infrastructure, the researchers concluded heāor the groupāis āa Russia-controlled platform that can act as a censored hacktivist. Moscow determines what Guccifer 2.0 shares and thus can attempt to selectively impact media coverage, and potentially the election, in a way that ultimately benefits their national objectives.ā
That finding matches the political motive that U.S. officials told The Daily Beast they have seen in Russiaās hacking of the DNC. The FBI said on Monday that it was investigating the breach, which a growing number within the Obama administration believe was designed to embarrass Democrats, exacerbate tensions between Hillary Clinton and her former rival Bernie Sandersāas well as his votersāand ultimately to give a boost to Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Researchers from cyber security company CrowdStrike have publicly attributed the DNC breach to the work of two known Russian government hacker groups that have also targeted U.S. government agencies, the White House, and American universities. The tactics and techniques in those campaigns match up with forensic evidence gathered from the DNC breach.
ThreatConnectās findings seem to underscore the extent to which the Russian government, at least initially, wanted to obscure its role in a so-called active measures campaign designed to cause mischief in the U.S. election, said Barger, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst.
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āDNC Hackerā Unmasked: He Really Works for Russia, Researchers Say
Freaking losers!
