On Friday, almost 20,000 emails from the DNC’s private servers were released by WikiLeaks, and the official story is that they came from one hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0. No similar intrusions have so far been detected at the RNC or the campaigns of the two major party candidates, the officials say.
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Its findings were later supported by similar conclusions reached by FireEye’s Mandiant unit and Fidelis, two other USA -based cyber companies.
“Considering the calculated release of these emails and the fact that it was Russian state actors that had the emails, experts have been inferring it was the Russians who perpetrated this leak for the objective of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton”.
The Clinton campaign has sought to deflect questions about party efforts to derail the rival Sanders bid with suggestions that Russian Federation was behind the leaks to help Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager on Sunday accused Russian hackers of releasing internal emails to help Republican Donald Trump win the presidential election.
“If [it’s a coincidence] it’s a really great coincidence”, said Russian Federation expert Fiona Hill, who directs the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.
“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know unlike what we have in this country”, Trump told MSNBC in December.
In an article published Monday, The New York Times reported that researchers at CrowdStrike, an Irvine, Calif. -based cybersecurity firm, had concluded the breach was the work of two Russian intelligence agencies, or people working for or with them. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article. The FBI has announced that it will investigate the hack. “I think we need to let the Federal Bureau of Investigation do their work before we try to form any conclusions here in terms of what happened and what the motivation was behind it”. The malicious code, including a reused IP address, was found in other attacks believed to have been carried out by the Russian hacking groups.
“The new joke in town is that Russian Federation leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should have never been written (stupid), because Putin likes me”, Trump wrote as part of a series of Tweets. “I would say this is not surprising at all, this is what intelligence agencies” want to get. Based on malware left behind in the attack, however, security experts believe that at least one of the attackers is also responsible for other breaches of non-classified data within the USA government.
Buratowski said IP addresses linked to the attack were associated with Russian servers.
The release of the emails over the weekend, however, raised new questions among government and private sector security officials.
TRUMP’S WARMER TONEAnalysts said Russia’s goal may be much broader than simply meddling in the US presidential election. This is a spectacularly successful intelligence operation.
Foreign spy agencies routinely try to collect information on US elections, and there were some cyber attacks against political campaigns detected during the 2012 election cycle. Even at the height of the Cold War it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that his rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key USA adversary.
But the theory that Russian Federation facilitated the leaking of tens of thousands of emails, some of them damning, from the Democratic National Committee, can not be dismissed as trifling. The answer won’t likely come until well after the election.
While there is nothing new in one nation using its intelligence services to try to influence an election in another, doing so by hacking into a political party’s computers and releasing their emails does seem somewhat new.
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The hackers, whoever they are, have reportedly been infiltrating the DNC for at least a year, and U.S. officials expect more data releases.
