When the story about Russian hackers gaining access to the Democrat National Committee computer system broke earlier this week, party representatives maintained no donor information was taken. Alperovitch called the group’s tradecraft “superb” with “operational security second to none”.
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“The document – which according to embedded metadata was created by a Democratic strategist named Warren Flood – was created on December 19, 2015, and forwarded to us by an individual calling himself ‘Guccifer 2.0, ‘ a reference to the notorious, now-imprisoned Romanian hacker who hacked various American political figures in 2013”, said Gawker.
While Cozy Bear had infiltrated the network in August, and had access to email and instant messaging communications, the alarm was set off when Fancy Bear also attacked the organisation in a bid to find and exfiltrate documents with information about likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The Smoking Gun on Wednesday pointed readers to a PDF of a 237-page report on Trump.
Guccifer is the handle used by a notorious hacker who first revealed the existence of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
The hacker also published the documents on their blog.
Thev documents were stolen from the Democratic National Committee last week by Russian government hackers.
Moscow political analyst Fyodor Lukyanov added that, in his opinion, the Russian elite see Trump as “potentially a better partner” than Hillary Clinton and would be unlikely to launch a cyber attack that could “electrify the campaign of the Democratic candidate”.
Hackers allegedly gained access to the DNC network a year ago, but were purged from the system in just the last few days. “But in fact, it was easy, very easy…I guess CrowdStrike customers should think twice about company’s competence”. “Do you really believe it?” the alleged hacker taunted. The files include a report on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as well as information about the party’s donors.
It’s not clear whether those documents are legitimate.
“CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016”, explained CrowdStrike CTO Dmitri Alperovitch in a blog post Wednesday.
On a WordPress page set up to host the stolen documentation the hacker said: “Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by “sophisticated” hacker groups”.
“I completely rule out a possibility that the government or the government bodies have been involved in this”, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told the Reuters news agency in Moscow. “Much of it false and/or entirely inaccurate”.
In a statement responding to the posting of the document, Trump accused the DNC of “hacking” its own system to divert attention away from its “deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader”.
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According to the DNC and CrowdStrike, the cyber firm that helped clean up the breach, the hackers were able to read emails and chat conversations, the Washington Post reported.
