… This game-changer scenario of Russia trying to influence the results of a U.S. “What happened over the weekend started to move us toward this middle course of action. The New York Timesalso raised the specter of Russian involvement. Why is Russia so involved? The theory among some Democrats and left-leaning news outlets is that Russian President Vladimir Putin would (unsurprisingly) prefer to deal with an isolationist-minded President Trump than a more hawkish (and much less friendly) President Clinton and is using cybercrime as a way to influence the U.S. “Since I started digging into Manafort, these messages have been a daily occurrence on my Yahoo account despite changing my password often,” wrote in a May 3 email to Luis Miranda, the DNC’s communications director, which included an attached screengrab of the image of the Yahoo security warning. Quoting an email Chalupa sent to the DNC - released as part of the Wikileaks data dump - Yahoo reports that Chalupa began receiving security notices informing her that her email account was being targeted by state actors: It’s not just the technical nature of the leaks themselves that have some outlets saying Russia’s fingerprints were all over this hack.Īn investigative report from Yahoo released yesterday indicates that one of the hack’s earliest targets was DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa, who was conducting opposition research on Donald Trump’s campaign adviser Paul Manafort, who allegedly made millions working as a campaign adviser for the now-ousted former Ukrainian president (and ostrich lover), Viktor Yanukovych. news cycle, but became great agit-prop tools in Russia, whose state-affiliated news agencies picked up on each morsel as yet another example of the cornucopia of electoral corruption in the decadent West. Gidwani characterized the information leaked had very little impact on the U.S. presidential election.Īt the outset, the Guccifer 2.0 releases were following that pattern. Gidwani believes that the Russian hack may have initially been intended for low-level intel that could be used to support Russian narratives about the U.S., but morphed into an attempt to influence the U.S.

“Guccifer 2.0 has been part of a Russian denial and deception program,” said Toni Gidwani, director of research operations at ThreatConnect on a conference call today. The idea that a non-governmental actor pursuing a personal political agenda could hack the DNC and potentially sway an election is bad enough, an act of cyberwarfare by a foreign state is arguably much worse.

But ThreatConnect’s research suggests that Guccifer 2.0 is simply an invention of the Russian government to deflect attention from its involvement in the breach. Now that DNC emails harvested during the breaches are starting to appear on Wikileaks, pundits are speculating that Russia leaked the emails in a bid to land Donald Trump in the Oval Office. But is the email leak also attributable to hackers on Russia’s government payroll?Ī new analysis released by security consulting firm ThreatConnect has marshaled more evidence to prove that hackers linked to the Russian government communicated with journalists about the leaked documents.Ī hacker set up a website and Twitter account to take credit for the DNC breach soon after it was initially reported, calling himself Guccifer 2.0 (a moniker modeled after a Romanian hacker who is recently pleaded guilty to hacking American political operatives). That claim shed doubt on initial reports from The Washington Post and others that laid the responsibility for the breach squarely at the feet of organizations with ties to the Russian government and its president, Vladimir Putin. By now, it’s pretty clear that Russian hackers are responsible for breaches of the Democratic National Committee networks that occurred last summer and in April of this year - several forensic security firms have found evidence that traces the breach back to Russia.

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